Watercolor art for a seafood menu.
#art #menudesign #seafood #mermaid (at Ondine House)
Bring it.
#england #uk #seafood #lobster (at The Ship Inn, Low Newton)
On the recommendation of a local, we made our way to a fish restaurant, a simple neighborhood trattoria just outside Rome’s bustling historical center and near the imposing stone walls of the Vatican. Underneath the hand-painted mural of a mermaid, we ate rigatoni smothered in garlicky chopped squid and heaped with snowy mountains of pecorino, and plates of bitter chicories wilted in fried garlic and dried peperoncino. Whole sea bream was roasted in the wood oven naked but for a branch of flowering thyme and plated with halved Amalfi lemons. The language in the air was decidedly the native tongue of this chaotic eternal city, the sign of a true gastronomic find; the fine bottle of Falanghina running dry long before our conversation.
#italy #rome #playingtourist #seafood (at Il Bar Sotto Il Mare 2)
She set the massive plateau in the center of the tiny table, her wisps of arms revealing a sinewy musculature acquired from long years of carrying plates to and from the kitchen, her gauzy blue tee-shirt announcing the restaurant’s name, Chez Francois, in blocky white lettering. Balanced precariously on a metal stand on a lopsided table set on an ancient stone street next to a bustling harbor, the tray was weighty with crushed ice and layered with clams and oysters, whelks and mussels, periwinkles and lobster and as requested, an equal number of chunky lemon slices. In clipped English, she warned us not to eat from just one side, lest the entire tray and all its contents slip back into the ocean. Young and old, man and woman, accountant and farmer, married and lover sat elbow to elbow slurping oysters, peeling mussels and shrimp from their shells, and forking into plates of grilled dorado fished from Sete’s waters, a bottle of inexpensive Provençal wine protruding from dripping ice buckets set on tables clothed with a tear of butcher paper. A handsome Frenchmen, in that way that all Frenchmen are handsome, shucked oysters and clams without pause, a cigarette dangling from perfectly pouted lips. We ate in silence, only occasionally groaning with pleasure as the cold, salty ocean depths lingered on our tongues, while overturning emptied shells onto the melting ice, an internationally recognized symbol of triumphal bivalve bliss.
#france #provence #seafood (at Sete, France)