Maria Pia's Trattoria

I'm catching up on emails so this is just a short post, about one of the best restaurant meals ever! This is my daughter Louise, me and Maria Pia at Maria Pia's Trattoria where Louise works and where she took me for dinner on my birthday. Maria Pia is from Puglia in Italy and is an advocate of Slow Food and the traditional regional foods she grew up with. It is Maria Pia's practice, and pleasure, to mingle with the guests at her restaurant and she is a vivacious character who reminds me of my Aunt Laura.

We had buffalo mozzarella from Italy with wonderfully flavoured tomato slices, and pugliese olives (so tiny, so good) to start with. Then I had groper on a bed of kale (my favourite green vege) and fennel (which I hadn't tried before and expected to be more highly flavoured) with a delicious salsa verde on top. Both Louise and I consider dessert to be the most important part of the meal and we arranged to sample little bits of several different desserts including a chocolate cake (too rich even for me, by that stage) and a tiramisu (too much coffee for me) and two delicious desserts that I can't remember the names of... one was sort of like berry trifle but Italian and one was a light kind of panna cotta, very subtle and refreshing. I had to be rolled out to the car after all that oh so goodness.