Mario, c'mon!

B and I finally got out of the house and got ourselves to a pizzeria. We met up with her momma and brother at Otto, Mario Batalli's joint. I've eaten here several times over the years, and I must say every time I like it less and less. Maybe it's because I've become more pizza-aware over the time?

The service was unusually lousy, but I can easily forgive that for great food. But this was not great food. I started with a shrimp appetizer, which was really a small bowl of chickpeas and hot pepper, with some small blanched freezer-fresh shrimps strewn in. This is Italian cooking, man, simple recipes that live or die by the quality of the ingredients! This one was DOA.

There are basically two columns of pizza on the menu, classic and neuveau. B went for a simply pepperoni pie, and momma got the quatro stuzzini (or some such Italian name), which was basically a margarita with a different topping in each quadrant -- cooked prociutto, butternut squash, mushrooms and something else. I ordered from the funkier side of the menu -- fungi & tallegio. I learned to love the soft, wine-flavored ripe cheese in c-school. The pizza was....fneh. The crust was nicely colored, brown and spotty like a good crust should be. But it's not really baked -- it's cooked on a griddle, and it's snap-to-chew ratio is much closer to a cracker-like snap than any significant chew. (Good pizza should have a balance.) The tallegio itself was good, but there was too much of it and there were too much cooked mushrooms. Every bite was just gobs of cheese and mushrooms, overwhelming the sense of crust. It was just....unpleasant to eat.

B went out this evening to a girls-nite-out kind of thing, so I was the good house husband and stayed home and baked brownies. I used this recipe, replaced extract with the scrapings of 2 vanilla beans, doubled the salt and replaced walnuts with a cup and a half of semi-sweet chocolate chips. Makes me want to make chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream and a hot fudge sauce to pour all over the hot mess. Porno a la chocolate!

All the tallegio and hot chilis weren't too kind to me this evening, but was greatly soothed by two warm, gooey brownies.

ADDENDA:
While picking up groceries at the market, had the pleasure of running into two famous people. One was the author Sarah Vowel, of whose historical political diatribes I've read several. The other one was our very own HVS!

BREAKFAST: 10:30am, organic cheerios with the bleah milk, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 1:30pm, bread & olive oil, a few bread sticks, chickpeas with shrimp and chilies, tallegio & mushroom pizza, small slice of pepperoni pizza, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 5:30pm, swig of apple cider, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 7:45pm, 2 homemade brownies, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5