A Cook's Journal

Chronicling My Time in Italy in 2001.

Loyal readers will recall I’ve been sifting through all the stuff I moved out of my storage space after closing my restaurant late last year.

As I go through everything, scanning and digitizing decades of old photos, menus, and notes, it brings me back to those past days when I was an aspiring chef, a line cook, a world explorer, or a new parent. Sitting here, today, in the moment of my life that I’m in, knowing everything I now know, there’s still a lot I can learn from looking back at who I was then and listening to what I had to say at the time about it all.

The process is helping give me a better wideview perspective and I’m grateful to have this moment of relative inactivity where I can pause and reflect. And write about it. To kind of square the circle.

The post that follows is the first of what will be a pretty longform series. I lived, touristed, and worked as a cook in Italy in 2000-2001, mostly in Bologna, but I traveled extensively over the year. I kept handwritten journals and spent a good chunk of time and money going to internet cafes to read and write emails to my folks back home.

Reading through these now brings me right back to that time and I recognize my voice and my own thoughts in my writing from 21 years ago. It’s fun to relive it all vicariously knowing now how it all ends up working out in the end.

I worked as a line cook in a small, independent restaurant run by a mad Sicilian giant of a chef. Da Francesco served a menu of traditional Sicilian staples featuring many ingredients that Chef had hand-delivered via train messenger straight from his hometown of Siracusa. To the Bolognese, accustomed to their eggy rich pasta fresca drenched in butter, cream, and cheese, the light, bright Siclian fish-based dishes accented by citrus, capers, olives, sundried tomatoes, and wild foraged herbs we were serving were an exotic novelty.

Oh, and FYI, Dear Reader, I’m now putting all non-Burger-Shop-related posts behind the subscriber paywall, but if you prefer to just stay on the free subscription side, you will still see everything having to do with Edzo’s when it’s first published. Thanks to those who choose to subscribe and help me pay my bills, and also thanks to everyone who is reading along. Your clicks and kind words of encouragement give me the confidence to put myself out there and share all this.

Ok, so….without further delay, here’s the first entry for my new series of posts

A Cook’s Journal

Handwritten menu by Francesco Di Natale, Trattoria Da Francesco, Bologna, Italy, 2001

03/09/2001 1:25am

Had a fairly interesting day today. Lunch was kind of crazy. When I got in, Marco was moving pretty slow. He seemed out of it, which isn’t like him. I checked the station and did a few things, but he kept saying that we were “tutto aposto” so I didn’t worry too much.

I should’ve known better.