The whole thing is just so straightforward, so guileless, that my first thought is, Where is the chef’s hand in all this? Then I realize that the chef’s hand is in the fact that his hand isn’t obvious.
The courses keep coming (the service is friendly but crisp, with no unnecessary flourishes). First, there is an extraordinary “chaud-froid” of tissue-thin slices of raw red shrimp topped with pieces of warm, perfectly cooked John Dory; then a few exemplary scampi, lightly cooked, with silky purées of cauliflower and celery; some impeccably fresh small scallops, each stippled with minuscule pink dots of mortadella (!), alongside slices of lightly caramelized fennel and a pool of applesauce (which, however counterintuitively, offset the flavor and texture of the meat-tinged scallops nicely).
Next comes a minestrone asciutto (dry minestrone) composed of very flavorful, amazingly tiny vegetables—carrots the size of roof nails, turnips not much bigger than peas—with two rosy ingot-shaped pieces of fresh tuna-like palamita marinated in ginger and other spices; and slightly chewy agnolotti, with a rich golden dough filled with intense, cooked-down fresh tomatoes and topped with a “little salad” of tiny squid, scampi, and shrimp, all barely cooked.
Two things are becoming pretty clear: First, Pierangelini is a master with seafood, a man who knows how to choose the finest fish and shellfish (journalist Prandi calls him “a talent scout for ingredients”) and cook them to absolutely the optimum point; second, occasional unexpected combinations notwithstanding, his food is surprisingly simple and pure.
The meal continues with Gambero Rosso’s most imitated dish (there are versions of it all over Italy), a chickpea purée that somehow seems both rustic and refined, inset with sweet, juicy shrimp. Then two more signature dishes: a zuppetta (little soup) of rich Burrata cheese cloaking ravioli filled with salty herring and garnished with shavings of gray-mullet bottarga, surprisingly delicate for all its briny authority; and a dish the restaurant has been serving for 25 years: ravioli, some white, some black (with cuttlefish ink), filled with fish-based forcemeat and moistened with seafood cream. Finally, a row of moscardini—baby octopuses, almost Nantucket red in color, squeaky and sweet, on top of sauces of almond and red pepper that taste vividly of exactly what they’re made of.
Dessert is out of the question, but I manage to nibble at an assortment of Tuscan Pecorinos of various ages and strengths and one strong gray goat cheese garnished with scallion marmalade, chestnut honey, oil-packed baby artichokes, and a salad of uncommon ovoli mushrooms (Amanita caesarea), faintly earthy, faintly lemony. Then thank you and good night.
The next day, I return to Gambero Rosso for lunch, this time sitting at a long table in the restaurant’s front room, a room otherwise crowded with books and magazines, sofas, and a breakfront full of liquors, from rare Romano Levi grappas to ancient Armagnacs. This is nothing so grand as a “chef’s table,” but it is a table at which Pierangelini and his wife eat a little or have a glass of wine when they have a moment, and sit after lunch and dinner service with friends.
Pierangelini, I learn, as he stops to talk between kitchen tasks, was born in Rome in 1953 but moved with his family to this part of Tuscany when he was six. He learned to cook from his mother and liked to make meals for friends and schoolmates. One of his early specialties was spaghetti alla carbonara, to which he added smoked salmon. One evening, with no wine available for the task, he made a risotto with Campari. His first official cooking job came in 1977, when he took over the kitchen at a bar and disco called Casa Rossa, in Baratti, just south of San Vincenzo. He liked the work, and early in 1980 he and Emanuela bought a derelict summer seafood restaurant, already called Gambero Rosso, in San Vincenzo. Not long afterward, Pierangelini first made his chickpea purée with shrimp—with that dish, his father told him, he could conquer the world.
He is certainly conquering me: My lunch begins with a piece of precisely cooked dentice (a breamlike fish called dentex in English) with some tender curls of trippa di baccalà (salt-cod stomach). From then on, the meal is landlocked: a rich ravioli of chestnut and pumpkin in pumpkin sauce; meltingly soft tortelli of pumpkin almost obscured by a shower of white truffle slices; round, deckle-edge sweet-onion ravioli, glistening in butter and striped with that excellent aceto balsamico. Then, with a bottle of elegant Sassicaia, a main course of paper-thin slices of moist, herb-flavored suckling pig (from a herd of heritage cinta senese pigs raised by Fulvietto Pierangelini) arrives on a bed of potatoes puréed with olive oil and sliced sautéed porcini, with a fine excelsior of crisp potato shreds on top and a cannellone filled with minced pork shoulder and topped with—what else?—white truffles. Damn, this food is good. So, er, is this the best restaurant in Italy? Who cares? And leave me alone. Can’t you see that I’m eating?
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