About

This blog
Foodie: a person who has an ardent or refined interest in food.

Tuscan: of or relating to Tuscany, its people or their language.

And that's exactly what I am: a person from Tuscany who has an ardent (not so sure about the refined bit) interest in food. I also love motorbikes, hats, books and traveling. (And if you want to understand how it feels to be a Tuscan abroad, you should read this).

When my wife and I moved to Chicago, in 2009, we knew we would love the city. What we probably were not expecting though was to love the food so much. Don't get me wrong: we are not like most snotty Europeans that would refuse to admit that anything but their own cuisine taste good. But we were not prepared for the mind-blowing culinary bliss we have found here.

To many Europeans, American food is synonym to fast food. What we get in Europe are only the big burger chains. They are not particularly good and, on top of that, they often adjust their recipes to suit allegedly different European tastes. The end result is that a burger at a MacDonald in France or Italy will probably taste a lot worse than its equivalent in the USA.

We knew that American cuisine was more than that: we had visited the country many times, and we had always eaten well (we still dream of that Mahi Mahi encrusted in macademia nuts we ate in Hawaii five years ago...). But I guess it is only by actually living here that we are coming to realize what a feast for the senses a city such as Chicago - and the rest of the country - can be.

So, the story with this blog is simple. I am going to tell you a bit about my discovery of food here, what we like, what we don't like. What we find funny when we read that a certain restaurant is "European". How the burgers are different than anything you can possibly eat elsewhere. How hot dogs are NOT simply the sad and soggy little things you find in the frozen section of European department stores. And how a good chili con carne can send you to Heaven.

My plan is also to talk about specific restaurants (good and bad), mostly in Chicago, for the simple fact that we live here. But we will also talk about other locations, since the regional variations are huge (yes, Georgia red rice, I am thinking about YOU), and we are trying to taste them all...

And yes, we will also talk about fast food chains: one of my projects (suggested by my wife, who regretted to have launched this idea immediately after) is actually to eat in all of them, and tell you which one is better.

So, are you hungry yet?

My love for food

As for most people in love with food, it all started when I was a little kid: sometimes my mom used to make dough for pizza or frittelle (fried Tuscan pancakes). I would stop whatever I was doing, and I would watch her, fascinated. The smell of the dough, the hands sinking through the moist whiteness mesmerized me. I would patiently wait for her to finish, so that we would then sit down and create little figurines with tooth sticks and some dough that she would set aside for the job. And I guess my love for food started right there.

I began to experiment with cooking when I was 16. The results weren't pretty: my tomato sauce tasted extremely bad, and my little sister would refuse to eat it. And I couldn't understand why my eggs ended up getting burnt, until I was told you had to use oil...

But things got better. When I left home I was well equipped with the basic of Italian and Tuscan cooking. And I was ready for more. In Belgium, where I lived ten years, I had Japanese customers who introduced me to the wonders of Japanese cuisine, that is so much more than sushi. And together with the Belgian girl who would have then become my wife, we set on a food discovery journey that brought us to try every possible restaurant in Brussels (Thai, Vietnamese, Bruxellois, French, Indian, Brazilian. You name it, we probably tried it and we probably loved it). Not to mention that we often picked holiday destinations also on the basis of the food we could eat there: I have eaten octopus still alive (tasty, but I do prefer them dead, I must admit), and a variety of meats that a lot of people would consider odd, including kangaroo, ostrich, dogs, crocodile, horse. Kangaroo meat is amazing. Not so sure about the dog, though.