Birthday Dinner at Osteria Carlina
In Which I Tell You About My Birthday Dinner
It might surprise you to hear that when I left Italy, I was overjoyed.
Three years seems like nothing now, but the reality of living there destroyed any romantic idea I might’ve had about it (largely by things I didn’t anticipate would bother me). Moving to a landlocked town of 30,000 people after growing up in New York is quite like yeeting oneself into a freezing pool after a schvitz.
After the newness of it wore off, I got bored of the five or six things I could eat in that town, called Bra (ha ha). They were all local classics, which meant they were rendered gloriously, even reverently. But that didn’t make them less of an eventual bore. One can only eat so much Salciccia di Bra (raw veal sausage, the fanciful delicacy of the town in question). After three years of restriction, with periodic returns to NYC to devour Dim Sum and Pad Kee Mao, I was done. I felt I could go the rest of my life without seeing another polenta. In fitful sleeps over the last year and a half of my Italian life, I dreamt of glistening Cachapas.
As quickly as it began, it ended unceremoniously. I didn’t mind the interruption that COVID created, because by July 2020 I was back home. I was deliriously happy that all the things that made me miserable about living in Italy (and more generally in a small town) weren’t a problem for me anymore. Sure, there were some elements of the Italian lifestyle that I wanted to emulate here in the city, but nothing is impossible.
By the time a year in New York passed, I started to notice cravings. I daydreamed of Vitello Tonnato, of the little sandwiches my favorite coffeeshop used to make with it. They were the only thing to cure a Barolo hangover, and I hypothesized they might be the cure to a Tequila hangover, as well.
I also began to miss the feeling of a higher-end Piedmontese meal, of brutal Novembers ameliorated only by a shared plate of Tajarin, white truffle shavings resting daintily on top. I even missed Bunet, the ultra-rich, amaretto-flavored pudding they served almost ubiquitously throughout the region. For a long while, I couldn’t admit it to anyone— let alone to myself. After three years of kvetching about how boring Piedmontese food was, it felt like hypocrisy.
It was, then, incredibly convenient that my boyfriend included Osteria Carlina as the wild card on his list of birthday dinner suggestions. I had requested dinner at an Izakaya, thinking I’d enjoy the cozy atmosphere on what is usually the coldest day of the year (i.e. my birthday, for several years running). When Luke sent the list, I studied each menu and website. The Izakaya and Izakaya-adjacent options were enticing, but none piqued my interest any more than the rest. I opened Osteria Carlina’s menu and closed it rather quickly, recognizing its contents immediately. It resembled the menu of the restaurant I lived across the street from in Bra: Osteria Boccondivino (Boccon+di+vino=mouthful of wine, but also Boccon+divino=divine morsel). I loved that restaurant. It was one of those places that felt like a living room in the best way, much like The Acre in Ridgewood and that one Egyptian restaurant I stumbled upon in the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv (that’s a story for another day). The menu items were pretty much the same as you’d find anywhere in the Roero, the sleepy winemaking region Bra was situated in, and Osteria Carlina had them all down. Rabbit cooked in wine (here with red instead of my preferred Arneis), snails with polenta in a straightforward tomato sauce, Tajarin with truffles, Gnocchi with Castelmagno cheese (though these didn’t look as much like mac & cheese as the traditional recipe does)… and of course, sitting pretty in the appetizers section, Vitello Tonnato. I mulled the idea over in my mind a little, with the knowledge that some of the other restaurants on the list had gotten write-ups in all the big food publications and typically booked up quick. I had a finite amount of time to pick a spot.
Because my preference was not immediately apparent to me, I made what I thought was an unrelated choice, to procrastinate. I watched a cute TV show set in Turin, and enjoyed playing the game of ‘spot-where-you’ve-smoked-weed’, where I carefully observe exterior shots until I recognize a spot where I once smoked weed. Those moments floated through my mind as I played. I thought of a Bunet-flavored hash cigarette shared outside an “anarchist bar”, whatever that is (it seems to be a particularly European style of locale). I salivated a bit at the thought of Caffé Corretto. I have an ongoing project to see how often and at how many restaurants I can attempt to order one (with amaretto, please, but amaro is ok also. NO grappa or genepy.) I briefly noted that Osteria Carlina could guarantee one.
When I had put off the decision enough that Luke felt compelled to cajole me into a choice, I did so without thinking very hard. He didn’t seem as surprised as I thought he’d be, but perhaps that’s a testament to our harmonious companionship or something like that. He booked the table and we waited.
I tend to have a bit of a sad time on birthdays, even though I always want it to be fun and amazing and special (potentially this is my downfall), but in spite of plans going awry, I quietly anticipated our dinner. I wanted to drink Arneis and order things in an accent I know is perfectly correct.
When the time came, that accent became useful. The two servers clocked me as Italian, and it wasn’t until we had conversed for several minutes that my boyfriend looked at me with panicky eyes, reminding me that he had no idea what we were saying (I’m exaggerating— to give credit where credit’s due, it was probably somewhat comprehensible, he’s learning!) I kept unwittingly shifting from one language to the other as the night carried on. It had been a long while since I had the opportunity to do that with someone other than my mother and grandmother (who, like me, speak an anachronistic Italian that hasn’t evolved past 1962 when my grandmother left the country). It was fun, what can I say? I’m not blessed with being bilingual in a language you hear a lot of around here.
The food was good, albeit a little extravagant compared to the dishes I remembered. I was maybe asking for too much when I hoped the appetizer portion would be as abundant as I remembered it was in Italy. It proved to be much smaller, and the sauce much more elegant than I recalled. It made me want for the Tonnata sauce that came in a metal tube like Italian mayonnaise did. The Tajarin were made exactly as they ought to have been— toothsome in spite of their thinness, like a well-rendered soba. I had ordered them off the truffle menu, so we witnessed the lovely little performance of the truffle shaving at our table. Unfortunately, so did the rest of the restaurant, to my chagrin. The truffles were black, which I should have expected this time of year, but all this did was make me nostalgic for those days where I’d take a train ride to Alba to buy a peak-season white truffle.
The bread was beautiful, a detail I always appreciate in a European restaurant. The focaccia was fluffy and made with high-quality olive oil, but didn’t fall victim to the Piedmontese mistake of involving too much oil (I got very sick of focaccia from most panetterie in town for this reason). The oil served with the bread was equally nice, featuring that delightful piquancy that is so valued by Italians. The wine was stupendous, an Arneis I had bought so many times before (though at a staggering markdown at my local enoteca). I tensed when I saw the price on the check, but it was my birthday so I let it go.
The rabbit was a bit heavy for me (I tend to like my small-boned animals cooked in white wine), so I swapped plates with my boyfriend who had cleverly ordered a hazelnut-crusted branzino. Nothing like anything I had ever eaten in Piemonte, but delicious nonetheless. We finished with a Caffé Corretto, an order that had the server apologizing profusely that they no longer had grappa in stock. I hadn’t heard of people drinking Caffé Corretto with grappa when I was in Italy, but I did see ancient men in the coffeeshops having glasses of grappa with their breakfast, so altogether not a shocking concept. We ordered ours with amaretto. Because it was my birthday, even though I’m not a dessert person, we ordered the Bunet. It wasn’t as jiggly as the version I knew, but it cut down on the richness in a way I thoroughly appreciated (perhaps an alteration made to satisfy the sugar-averse New York palate)
I left satisfied, though still desperate for the Tonnata sauce that tastes like how I remember. I was happy to eat these foods I used to revile but came to appreciate in their absence. This joy, however, was tempered by the realization that to truly scratch this itch, I’d have to go back to Bra for the Arneis-soaked rabbit at Boccondivino. I’d have to get their Bunet (or their Panna Cotta, an equally jiggly dessert), take a gratuitous slow-motion video of me slapping it with a spoon. Osteria Carlina did exactly what it was supposed to do— I simply didn’t anticipate that it would awaken something in me that I wasn’t ready to reckon with.
Thanks to Luke for the suggestion and the wonderful birthday dinner.