Barbaresco at Firenze Osteria

I feel like I may have mentioned Firenze Osteria before. It's our new favorite restaurant in the valley where finding decent food is the biggest challenge. Top Chef contestant Fabio is the owner and chef. It's very cute and reminds me of restaurants we dined at in Tuscany. The food is pretty solid with some hits and misses in the pasta category, but light years above every other Italian restaurant in the area.

Today, we grabbed a bottle of Pio Cesare Barbaresco 2001 and headed out to our new favorite haunt. The wine was showing beautifully - right in its window of happiness! This is hardly a profound wine, but it is textbook Barbaresco. I have blind tasted this wine and nailed it down to the vintage. Bricking at the rim, rose petals and chalk on the nose with candied cherry fruit. Grippy, but only from the varietal character. It's pretty spot on right now!

It worked wonderfully with the Burratta and Bacon Crostini we had as a starter. And even better with the Orechiette with Sausage and Spinach. This was an awesome pairing! I ate the whole dish myself and didn't really share much with Kara. But she was much happier with the Butternut Squash Ravioli in the Brown Butter Sauce, even though it was not that great a wine pairing.

A quick note on how restaurants recover from bad experiences, because this was the real highlight of the day: They have this really awesome olive focaccia at Firenze Osteria. Kara dug in as soon as it hit the table and was about to take a bite when she saw that one of the olives was actually a dead fly. She quickly notified the server who apologized. The manager came by shortly thereafter and apologized, informing us the least they could do was take care of our lunch. What a recovery! As a restaurant manager, I don't expect this kind of response. We're the easy guests to deal with because we've been there a hundred times on the other end of it. But it reminded me how good it feels and how important it is to come back hard when a guest has a bad experience in your restaurant. The "recovery" from something like that is so important! I already liked this place, but now I know that if anything ever goes wrong, they've got my back! And I will definitely be telling my staff about how this bad experience was turned into an amazing one. Great work, guys!

So - another fantastic day in the world of food and wine. Hope you're drinking some good juice as well!