Osteria

Share the best restaurant experience you had this year. Who was there? What made it amazing? What taste stands out in your mind?*

Have I mentioned that I have four children? Yeahhh. I don’t go to restaurants often, much less good ones, much less with grown-ups. But! I did have a great meal just a couple weeks ago when I was in Philadelphia for work.

On our first night in the city, two colleagues and I went to Osteria. The food was just amazing. We shared two appetizers: the curly endive and radicchio salad with blue di capra, roasted chestnuts, and grilled apples, and the scallop crudo with fall vegetable dadini and citrus.

Uh, YUM.

The salad was just gorgeous. I would never expect grilled apples, a sharp cheese, and a sour vinaigrette to work so well together in a salad. I’m clearly an idiot.

The scallops were raw, and I’ll be damned if I don’t LOVE ME SOME RAW SEA CREACHAS. One of the women I was with was not as fond. She has a PhD in chemistry and taught secondary science for many years. She swore that she would tell us after we ate the scallops why we should never eat raw again. She never told us, and we didn’t remind her.

My portions of these beautiful appetizers were consumed, by the way, with a fantastic – and *EXTRAORDINARILY* alcoholic – Sicilian lemonade. Vodka, lemonade, fresh mint, and a few other things. My GAWD, that was a good drink.

Okay. Moving on.

For dinner, the three of us shared two individual pizzas on napoletane crust. The parma was topped with mozzarella, fontina, arugula, and prosciutto di parma. Imagine a pizza with gorgeous mozzarella slices, fresh arugula, and a bigass stack of shaved pig. Oh yesss.

The polpo was topped with octopus, tomato, red chili flakes, and smoked mozzarella. Oh. My. God. I don’t think I’d ever had octopus before, and I’d definitely never had it on a pizza. So so good. I don’t know why I’d always imagined octopus chewy, but it wasn’t at all. It was a lot like calamari when it’s cooked really well.

Anyway, yum. Great food, good service, EXTRAORDINARILY alcoholic drinks. Osteria FTW!

* This post was written in response to Gwen Bell’s December 2nd prompt for the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.