The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, published in Moscow in the 1930s, is one of the few mementos of my first, Soviet life that has miraculously survived my wanderings. I received it as a birthday present at the age of five, and this battered and dog-eared—yet still perusable—folio now adorns a bookshelf in my garden office.
As a child, I used to leaf through its glossy pages in bed when suffering with cold or flu or, more likely, faking them and playing truant. The book was filled with coloured pictures of alluring and not always “wholesome” foods. It opened with a regulation quote from Stalin and carried recipes for dishes that were all but imaginary in the semi-starving USSR of the 1960s, given they contained ingredients like meat, caviar, cheese and oranges. At the time even white bread and butter were rationed and buying them took hours of queuing. My grandparents used to take me to the waiting lines for, in the strict per capita rationing system, my little “capita” also counted.
Well, after 35 years in the west, I still find it hard to name the best restaurant I have dined in, but I know exactly which was the worst from my Soviet life. It was Mary, the restaurant attached to the dodgy hotel of the same name in the no-less-eponymous Soviet Turkmenistan town of Mary (pronounced Ma-‘ree) near the Afghan border.
I had the misfortune to stay there once when on a journalistic assignment from Moscow in the mid-1980s. A bearded Turkmen woman solemnly gave me the key to the hotel’s only “luxury suite”, a filthy, semi-dark room that smelled like a mortuary. It was 42°C outside, but the air conditioner did not work. Nor did the shower. The biggest surprise, however, was that I was to share the room and its only bed (medium-sized) with a male Communist party official from Ashgabat. He was snoring and fretting on his side of the bed all night and, when I finally managed to nod off, I dreamed of an earthquake.
The hotel’s restaurant was swarming with fat Central Asian flies, and only had eggs and cucumbers on the menu (not to count the insects, which often fell onto the patrons’ plates and were matter-of-factly consumed as the only bits of “meat” they could ever hope to taste). After just one meal of fried eggs, garnished with cucumbers and flies, I got severe food poisoning and nearly died.
My second life’s best food experiences have so far been closely associated with Italy—a country that I visit often and from where I’ve just returned. One of my books was about trying to find a bad meal in Italy and failing. That book, sadly, remains unfinished, largely because I had to be put on a strict diet halfway through the painstaking research.
Friends assure me that bad meals do exist in Italy, but finding them is not easy. It’s probably harder than discovering all the restaurants of the acclaimed Unione dei Ristoranti del Buon Ricordo—an exclusive club founded in 1964 to promote regional Italian cuisine, whose name loosely translates as “the union of restaurants worth remembering fondly”. There are only 108 such institutions. Each one has its signature dish, and any customer who orders it is entitled to a hand-painted souvenir plate. Previously, one had to guess which dish it was in order to receive the plate, but now it is usually clearly stated on the menu.
Buon Ricordo plates have become very collectable over the years; there’s even a special international plate collectors’ society, although I’ve never heard of anyone who had managed to accumulate more than 20. I myself have so far acquired only five.
Now I am happy to report that, having overcome a temporary Covid-related crisis, Buon Ricordo restaurants are back in action, and I’ve just added another plate to my collection. It comes from Ristorante Salice Blu (the Blue Willow) on the shores of Lake Como.
The Italian lakes area has long attracted gourmands from all over the globe to enjoy not only the exquisite local delicacies, but also the striking views of lakes and mountains—so ubiquitous and in-your-face that after a while they start feeling almost calorific. That is probably why the windows of Ristorante Salice Blu, which is on the hilly outskirts of Bellagio, do not overlook Lake Como. The views are conspicuous by their absence.
“Eighty per cent of visitors come to Bellagio solely for the views, but I cater for the remaining 20 per cent,” says chef Luigi Gandola, who runs the Blue Willow with his wife Camilla, his mother–“Mamma Flora”—and his dog Charlotte, who is specially trained to find black truffles.
Charlotte features prominently on the restaurant’s Buon Ricordo plate, which I had earned honestly by feasting on Risotto ai fiori di zucchina e tartufo di Bellagio—the signature dish, with a name that sounds like a short love poem by Petrarch.
After dinner, pressing the plate to my chest, I slowly walked down the hill towards the pier. It was dark, and a flock of brightly lit ferries on the lake’s inky surface resembled slices of a floating birthday cake, served haphazardly by the beaming chef of the full alpine moon.
