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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe trouble with Tuscany is all that Tuscan food. Ribollita. Rabbit. Rosemary on this or that. It tastes good, but no matter what restaurant I visit, the menu is always the same. Just when I thought I couldn't stand to dip any more unsalted bread in unfiltered olive oil, a friend led me to Da Giacomo, a Tuscan restaurant specializing in seafood.\n\nThe restaurant was in Milan, the capital of Lombardy, not in a Tuscan city such as Florence or Siena. This didn't surprise me, since I've never been to a restaurant in Tuscany that specializes in fish, even though Tuscany is located on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Most regions that boast a limitless amount of fish tend to serve a lot of it, particularly to willing tourists, but not Tuscany. I asked Marco Monti, the chef of Da Giacomo, if he could help me understand why Tuscan-restaurant owners are more obsessed with sausage than with seafood, and he insisted I had the wrong impression. He even named a few obscure Tyrrhenian seaside villages that Americans never visit as fine places to eat fish. \"Really, the restaurants in Marina di Massa are quite famous,\" he said.\n\nDa Giacomo has plenty of fish, all kinds of fish. There are usually a dozen or so varieties displayed on ice just inside the front door of the restaurant, which is owned by Monti's wife, Tiziana, and her father, Giacomo Bulleri.\n\n\"This used to be normal, to give customers a view of the fish,\" he said. Not many restaurants display fish anymore, not since they realized they could make a lot more money by installing a bar in the same space and serving spumante by the glass.\n\nThe first time I visited this trattoria, which resembles an old French brasserie, I was with a group of eight. So many shrimp, lobsters and langostinos were on hand that I asked if we could have a few of each, grilled. Out came a silver platter\u2014a barge, really\u2014of the most luscious grilled seafood I've ever eaten, some soft and some crunchy, some sweet and some briny, some from Sicily and some from Liguria and some from places where I didn't realize people fished, all accented with the charred flavor of grilling that matches so well with the earthiness of shellfish. I asked Monti how he managed to cook his crustaceans so masterfully, and he replied, \"Every chef loves to have a secret to his cooking, but when it is on the grill it is just the grill, nothing else.\"\n\nI still eat in Tuscany a lot, but after dining at Da Giacomo, I find the experience more puzzling than ever. I'm always wondering why I'm not dining on gamberi netted off the coast that morning instead of slurping a bowl of soup made from bread that should have been thrown out the day before."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/lombardy-tuscany>