Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
When I eat at NY italian restaurants and then the older ones in Calgary, I wonder what boat came to Calgary way back when?
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Italian is kind of funny in that places, particularly those that started out family run, are more restaurants with people from Italy in the kitchen than they are "Italian restaurants". It's such a varied cuisine, most people default to pasta but that's really such a minute portion of it. Even tomatoes aren't really a huge part of Italian cuisine, but we tend to think they are. Italian-American adds so many weird twists, from combining a bunch of different regional dishes to taking small peasant dishes and packing them with tons of protein and cheese it's really a cuisine all to itself.
The places I listed above embrace that concept but give it more of a refined treatment, for instance the veal marsala at Carbone comes on the bone and uses those fancy mushrooms you're always afraid to buy at the store. They also copied the flooring for the restaurant directly from a scene in The Godfather.
Anyways, back to Calgary. What's La Brezza like these days? Is it even around? I remember eating there a good 10 years ago when the grandmother was still in the kitchen and it was phenomenal.