Tucci in Italy
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Is "tucci" Italian for "tushy"?
@LuFins-Dad may want to block that for Finley. -
Good point. Thanks for the tip @Axtremus
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Will have to watch this. We'll be going to Italy in a couple months. I hope the places he recommends don't get too crowded with tourists, but they probably will. Maybe we'll avoid those exact places.
Barri Weiss's sister opines on the show:
Mr. Tucci Goes to Italy
I thought we had enough shows in which middle-aged American men, who fancy themselves gourmands, travel, eat things, and talk about it: Phil Rosenthal, Guy Fieri, Anthony Bourdain. It’s been done.Then I watched Stanley Tucci’s new show—unfortunately and blandly titled, Tucci in Italy—out this week from National Geographic, and was pleasantly surprised. We see him winding, at ease, through the streets of Florence ordering a tripe sandwich for breakfast—that’s the stomach lining of a cow for the uninitiated—or eating dry-aged steak and sipping red wine in southernmost Tuscany with Italian cowboys called butteri. “Well, that looks good,” Tucci says with a smile when presented with his first sip of the show, a Negroni, which he enjoys alfresco. “And it tastes good, too.”
It’s all very watchable. Tucci has the lifestyle of a rich and famous man—he’s an actor first; food is to him what pigeon racing is to Mike Tyson—but he’s showing that his recipe for life can be modified. You may not get the chance to go to Italy this summer, but you could probably make a Negroni. Why not drink it outside? Or at least, open a window.
Compare Tucci’s pleasing show—with its light history, interviews with locals, demonstrations of ancient meat-curing techniques, and slow pace—with the show whose high it’s chasing, the one that launched a million travel shows like it. I’m talking, of course, about Bourdain’s No Reservations, and its later incarnation on CNN, Parts Unknown.
Bourdain came up in New York restaurants in the ’90s, exploded in popularity with his book Kitchen Confidential, and became the world-traveling, bad-boy punk chef of the early aughts. He treated ordering a bowl of soup like a search-and-rescue mission. He got tattooed on air. He swallowed a cobra heart that was still beating. His brand was so ascendant that even Barack Obama, then the president of the United States, participated—sharing bún chả and beer in Hanoi with Bourdain, yukking it up about foreign policy and which foods it’s acceptable to put ketchup on. All while sitting on a plastic stool. Dessert on No Reservations was always the same, and it was shaking your head over imperialism.
Bourdain only got more and more famous, up until he died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61. And though he was always larger than life, after his death something even bigger lived on. I have nothing against Bourdain the man, but the cult of personality he left in his wake is insufferable. His fans seem to think he invented getting drunk and being lonely at the same time, and that a meal is only worth eating if you nearly die in a tuk tuk to get there. He spawned a generation of men whose whole personality is based on daring themselves to eat the most gangrenous street meat on offer and then never shutting the hell up about it.
Now, we have a chef culture wherein tatted up, foul-mouthed cooks—that is, the people who heat up entrées—think they’re rock stars. Why? Because they cooked a broccoli in a wood-fired oven? They cured an egg yolk? Or because of Bourdain, who turned eating a prawn into an Allen Ginsberg poem?
When it comes to food tourism these days, there are the Bourdain fanboys on one hand, getting all existential about a Caesar salad, and deadpanning “influencers” on the other, whose judgement of whether food is good is predicated on if there are sufficient gobs of melty cheese on top of it. The influencers have never met a burger spot or an overpriced sushi counter that isn’t a “must-try” because they are in the business of advertising restaurants, amassing followers and, eventually, getting their meal comped. The restaurant says: “We put caviar on your chicken nugget”; they say: “My mind is blown.” And crucially, their phone eats first.
If Bourdain convinced people that unless you had to get a tetanus shot afterwards you weren’t having an authentic experience, the social media eaters treat restaurants like amusement parks, each appetizer a stomach-churning ride. Into this bleak scene trots Tucci, a gentleman who proves you can keep your jacket on if you like. He just drives to the places he wants to go to. He eats well, not dramatically. His show goes deep but doesn’t take itself too seriously. After eating a rabbit dish wrapped with lardo, which is cured pig fat, Tucci waxes: “It might seem less grand than carving angels from marble, but food that melts in your mouth like this is just as worthy a creation.” Preach, Tuc. Verdict: Watch “Tucci in Italy,” but not on an empty stomach.
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Will have to watch this. We'll be going to Italy in a couple months. I hope the places he recommends don't get too crowded with tourists, but they probably will. Maybe we'll avoid those exact places.
Barri Weiss's sister opines on the show:
Mr. Tucci Goes to Italy
I thought we had enough shows in which middle-aged American men, who fancy themselves gourmands, travel, eat things, and talk about it: Phil Rosenthal, Guy Fieri, Anthony Bourdain. It’s been done.Then I watched Stanley Tucci’s new show—unfortunately and blandly titled, Tucci in Italy—out this week from National Geographic, and was pleasantly surprised. We see him winding, at ease, through the streets of Florence ordering a tripe sandwich for breakfast—that’s the stomach lining of a cow for the uninitiated—or eating dry-aged steak and sipping red wine in southernmost Tuscany with Italian cowboys called butteri. “Well, that looks good,” Tucci says with a smile when presented with his first sip of the show, a Negroni, which he enjoys alfresco. “And it tastes good, too.”
It’s all very watchable. Tucci has the lifestyle of a rich and famous man—he’s an actor first; food is to him what pigeon racing is to Mike Tyson—but he’s showing that his recipe for life can be modified. You may not get the chance to go to Italy this summer, but you could probably make a Negroni. Why not drink it outside? Or at least, open a window.
Compare Tucci’s pleasing show—with its light history, interviews with locals, demonstrations of ancient meat-curing techniques, and slow pace—with the show whose high it’s chasing, the one that launched a million travel shows like it. I’m talking, of course, about Bourdain’s No Reservations, and its later incarnation on CNN, Parts Unknown.
Bourdain came up in New York restaurants in the ’90s, exploded in popularity with his book Kitchen Confidential, and became the world-traveling, bad-boy punk chef of the early aughts. He treated ordering a bowl of soup like a search-and-rescue mission. He got tattooed on air. He swallowed a cobra heart that was still beating. His brand was so ascendant that even Barack Obama, then the president of the United States, participated—sharing bún chả and beer in Hanoi with Bourdain, yukking it up about foreign policy and which foods it’s acceptable to put ketchup on. All while sitting on a plastic stool. Dessert on No Reservations was always the same, and it was shaking your head over imperialism.
Bourdain only got more and more famous, up until he died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61. And though he was always larger than life, after his death something even bigger lived on. I have nothing against Bourdain the man, but the cult of personality he left in his wake is insufferable. His fans seem to think he invented getting drunk and being lonely at the same time, and that a meal is only worth eating if you nearly die in a tuk tuk to get there. He spawned a generation of men whose whole personality is based on daring themselves to eat the most gangrenous street meat on offer and then never shutting the hell up about it.
Now, we have a chef culture wherein tatted up, foul-mouthed cooks—that is, the people who heat up entrées—think they’re rock stars. Why? Because they cooked a broccoli in a wood-fired oven? They cured an egg yolk? Or because of Bourdain, who turned eating a prawn into an Allen Ginsberg poem?
When it comes to food tourism these days, there are the Bourdain fanboys on one hand, getting all existential about a Caesar salad, and deadpanning “influencers” on the other, whose judgement of whether food is good is predicated on if there are sufficient gobs of melty cheese on top of it. The influencers have never met a burger spot or an overpriced sushi counter that isn’t a “must-try” because they are in the business of advertising restaurants, amassing followers and, eventually, getting their meal comped. The restaurant says: “We put caviar on your chicken nugget”; they say: “My mind is blown.” And crucially, their phone eats first.
If Bourdain convinced people that unless you had to get a tetanus shot afterwards you weren’t having an authentic experience, the social media eaters treat restaurants like amusement parks, each appetizer a stomach-churning ride. Into this bleak scene trots Tucci, a gentleman who proves you can keep your jacket on if you like. He just drives to the places he wants to go to. He eats well, not dramatically. His show goes deep but doesn’t take itself too seriously. After eating a rabbit dish wrapped with lardo, which is cured pig fat, Tucci waxes: “It might seem less grand than carving angels from marble, but food that melts in your mouth like this is just as worthy a creation.” Preach, Tuc. Verdict: Watch “Tucci in Italy,” but not on an empty stomach.
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@Horace Where are you going in Italy?
@taiwan_girl said in Tucci in Italy:
@Horace Where are you going in Italy?
Florence and then Tuscany. I'm looking forward to the steak restaurants. I'll probably have to avoid the exact one Tucci talked about, since it'll be overwhelmed by American tourists. With my new diabetes diet I can't really eat much in the way of pasta or pizza or desserts, but maybe I'll cheat a little bit.
