Iam old enough to remember when a night out in a restaurant always meant an Italian. Always. Especially in my home town, Glasgow: red sauce joints of varying degrees of sophistication, peppermills of towering intent, moustached lifer waiters calling my mother “Bella signorina” when she had five kids in tow.
Fashions in food have moved on, and the Italian restaurant has evolved to keep up with the dirty food purveyors, the Josper grillers, the lime-leaf importers – serving small plates, specialising (we’re not Italian; we’re Pugliese, or Abruzzese or Genovese), installing wood ovens and providing dishes that can garner a gasp on social meeja: sanguinaccio, maybe, a chocolate dessert laced with pig’s blood. (That last from Bocca di Lupo, still my favourite Italian restaurant in the capital, but at which I can never get a table.)
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