The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
Hoofing It Through the 'Hood

A funny thing happens when you embrace slow travel, settle in to a place for a week or so and become a bit of a temporary local: you slow down to the speed of life. Imagine what it would be like to post a daily diary like this about your daily doings when you're at home. Some days you would go places and do things; other days you'd just stay in and not do anything special. That's about where we are at this point.

We've been in Montepulciano so many times that there isn't much we haven't discovered in the area, so there's no real compulsion to be out and about. The big decision of the day are whether we should go out for lunch or dinner (we find that one meal out a day plus a snack at home pretty much does it for us.

The first order of business today was to do a load of laundry (gotta love having a washing machine in the apartment!) You sure can't do that in a hotel room and it cuts down on the amount of clothes we need to pack. This is another case for the slow travel way of seeing the world.

We kicked around the idea of ribollita at Trattoria di Cagnano again, but decided that I'd lose points with my restaurant folks for getting into a rut, so we tried out a new restaurant today. Cantina Gattavecchi is about half a block from the apartment and was closed for the holidays when were here in 2012. The reviews of the food were good (yes, like everyone else I check those out first), but it didn't look like much from the outside. The entrance was actually underneath an old church in what had once been a monastery.

When we walked in it looked like an enoteca (wine shop and wine bar) rather than a restaurant. We could see people working in the kitchen but there were no tables in sight. There were, however, cavernous aging cellars where casks of various Gattavecchi wines were slumbering, waiting until their time was right. We were greeted (in Italian, of course) by a sprightly little old lady who, we later learned, was part of the family and had been living in a small apartment in the building for the past fifty years.

Eventually we figured out that the dining room was upstairs and would be open for lunch in another fifteen minutes. A climb up a steep narrow stone stairway brought us into the monastery's former refectory. It was a dining room then and still was today. The menu was simple, based on traditional Tuscan recipes with a slight twist (Lilian, the chef, is Brazilian). We started with a painfully fresh bruschetta pomodoro (it's pronounced broos-KET-a, by the way). They offered four pastas and a choice of five sauces. Margene went for the pici with an intense porcini mushroom sauce.

I tried Tagliatelle de Vino Nobile con sugo d'anatra (wide handmade noodles made with the primo local wine in a light sauce of ground duck). It wasn't much to look at, but OMG was it memorable! I've never had ground duck before but it has some real possibilities! Needless to say, the wines were produced by the Gattavecchi winery. The Rosso de Montepulciano had good body and a smooth finish that worked well with the duck. I thought I had ordered a glass of the Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, the big wine of the region and a personal favorite, but something got lost in translation and it wasn't worth worrying about. I'll get my fill before we leave the area.

We needed to walk of the meal a bit, so we strolled up to Piazza Grande to investigate the music we've heard coming from that direction since last night. We stumbled into the middle of a Christmas market with rows of small shack-like buildings selling local handicrafts and food products. There were some beautiful things being offered but we don't need any more "stuff," no matter how pretty. So we meandered through the stalls, had espresso at an outside table while we people-watched and headed down the hill to our apartment. On the way, we were surprised to see that a small skating rink had appeared in one of the small parking lots by the fort. The weather isn't nearly cold enough to freeze the ice naturally, so it must be mechanically refrigerated. Very clever, these Italians.

That turned out to be the sum and substance of our travels today. We have food in the fridge for dinner, laundry drying on the radiators to fold and put away, a trip report to update and no lack of reading material. Tomorrow we'll head to another of our favorite little restaurants in a neighboring town, but for today, life is simple ... and very good. Ciao.

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