Baccalà Vino e Merendino | Riccardo's Living Room
A cold-cuts counter on a roundabout in Capezzano, a man who shouts, and the best tiramisu outside Treviso
The first thing you meet is not the food. It is Riccardo, at the small table in the back corner that is plainly his and has probably always been his, a glass of red already poured, a friend across from him, a small white Milanese dog the size of a loaf making more noise than a dog that size has any right to make. Sometimes there is a cigarette going, indoors, which no law in Italy permits and no one in the room is going to mention. He is talking at full volume because it is the only volume he owns. You have not ordered yet, and you are already inside something.
We came because of a video. We spend a fair amount of time at Violet Hill, the cocktail bar in Lido di Camaiore, and we follow Maurizio, who owns it and makes a serious drink, and one day this man turned up in his feed. Grey, old enough to be a young man’s father, built like someone’s reliable uncle, and running on the engine of someone half his age. Quintessentially Italian in a way that is hard to fake and impossible to describe without sounding like a tourism board. He had his own place, we learned, a counter of cold cuts up front and a kitchen behind it, sitting on a roundabout in Capezzano. We went out of pure curiosity, to find out whether a person could really be that alive. He could. We kept going back, and by the second visit the curiosity had quietly turned into something about the food.
The whole place is maybe forty square meters. You walk into the counter, cold cuts and local things behind glass, and behind that, a kitchen that is honestly just an oven and a stove and not much else. Over the door, the name promises three things: baccalà and wine and a snack, which is a joke and also a thesis. The baccalà never swam in this sea. It is North Atlantic cod, salted and dried and hauled down from cold water it had no reason to leave, and it took hold on a coast that pulls fresh fish out of the water every single morning, because it was cheap and it kept and the church’s lean days needed a fish that was not fresh fish. Cod and a glass of wine is one of the oldest pairings on this land, what the farmhands ate in the yard after the grapes came in. Riccardo took three peasant words and hung them over a door.
You turn away from the counter and walk straight into the dining room, which has five or so tables and a collection of mismatched chairs that were clearly rescued one at a time from the local used markets. The walls are covered, almost completely, in two things in roughly equal number: roosters, and pictures of Riccardo. The effect should be ridiculous, and instead it is the most honest interior decoration I have seen in a long time, a man telling you exactly what he loves before you have read the menu.
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There is a menu, about fifteen things, and whatever they decided to do that day. The night we keep coming back to, they were sending out a breaded cutlet the size of an elephant’s ear, hanging off both edges of the plate, the kind of dish a kitchen makes only when it is confident enough to be a little absurd. They cook the real local food too. Their tordelli, the stuffed pasta Versilia takes seriously enough to crown a best one every year, once won that prize outright, and the gold sits on their counter to prove it. There are big plates of meat. The wine is local and very good and arrives without ceremony. And the tiramisu, and I have eaten a great deal of tiramisu, is the best I have had outside Treviso, which is the town that invented it and does not hand the compliment out lightly.
What I did not understand on the first visit, and understood by the third, is that this is not a restaurant you sit in and observe. Most good restaurants keep a quiet wall between the room that cooks and the room that eats, and the pleasure is in watching the show from your side of it. There is no wall here. Riccardo shouts across it, the dog runs under it, the friend at the corner table becomes part of your evening whether you planned it or not, and somewhere between the cold cuts and the tiramisu you stop being a customer and become a guest at a family dinner you did not know you had been invited to.
We left full, which is the easy part. The harder thing to explain is that we left having been somewhere, not just having eaten somewhere. Riccardo was still at his table when we went, glass still poured, dog still loud, telling a story to someone who had heard it before and did not mind hearing it again. He barely looked up. You do not say goodbye to a living room.
