Bologna is sometimes referred to as “la grassa” in reference to its cuisine. It has a fantastic food district to wander around in, and we were engulfed by several tourist groups while strolling the streets around Tamburini (a deli/cafeteria style dining place lots of foodies rave about, but we didn’t end up eating there). It is this reputation for having the richest, most delicious food in all of Italy that had me waffling back and forth between Bologna and Parma while planning. Bologna won because my mom had been before and said the shopping was great (though I personally found it to be much better in Florence), and because of its proximity to the airport we would be flying in and out of.

Our first meal was at Caminetto D’oro. We dined on:

Fishy bread, tomato, basil
Zucchini salad with apple slices and parmesan. This was insanely simple and incredibly delicious, I need to remember to try to replicate this at home.
Ham from Parma with a variety of breads.
Homemade pasta with seasonal mushrooms.

This was a fantastic way to start off our trip! The food was simple, yet inventive. We walked out of there feeling like coming to Bologna was the best idea we’d ever had.

9 out of 10 stars for D’oro.

A note about Italian bread:

Before I forget to tell you, Italian bread is very dry and hard, nothing like what you find in restaurants in America. My reading suggests that the tradition of making it this way developed when the salt tax was very high, and so bakers made their bread with very little salt. Over time the Italians grew used to having their bread this way. I haven’t been to the south, and I know the north and the south are very different, so this might not be the case down in Palermo?

On our way back we saw a bunch of locals crowded around Stefino Gelato, and realized we hadn’t met our quota of one gelato/day.

They spoke almost no English, but I looked up the word for wafer and we did our best to guess at what we would like. I chose Bacio, which is basically Nutella. TH had something called Cuba, a mixture of vanilla, cream, and rum. It was 2 euros for a small, and though I wouldn’t go out of my way just to go there, if you eat at Caminetto D’oro it’s a nice place to get dessert afterward.

Based on a Chowhound recommendation, our lunch the next day was at Nicola’s Pizzeria.

We were eating during the slow period (Italians eat on a very different schedule than Americans), and the Italian-only speaking waiter did not seem happy to see us. From the other reviews, it sounds like you should really only get pizza if you go here. After a big, delicious hotel breakfast we decided to share a pizza with prosciutto, mozzarella, and tomatoes. The crust was thin and dry which TH didn’t like, but it was lightly sauced, which I really liked.

5 out of 10 stars for Nicola’s.

Our next stop was Moline Gelato. (I wish I had seen that blog post before we went!)

I had two flavors, dark chocolate and sour cherry, and I was disappointed by the sour cherry because I like the ice cream portion of that flavor to be very tart. TH had the praline, which he found to be overwhelmingly sweet, but very creamy.

Dinner that night was at Trattoria Meloncello. After reading review after review, this was the meal I was most excited about, and I had been hyping it up to That Husband for days. We came hungry and ready to eat, after our hike up to the Madonna of San Luca. All of the foodies online seemed to be raving about it! In short, the meal was so disappointing that I actually went back to our hotel and looked it up to make sure we hadn’t eaten at the wrong Meloncello or something.

We came in right when it opened, and were the only ones there the entire time. We sat outside, which was nice, but a bit noisy due to street traffic. We dined on:

Sasuage bolognese, which was swimming in cheese, so much that it overwhelmed the dish (I didn’t know this was possible).
A dish typical to Bologna that I didn’t catch the name of. (My Italian is quite poor.)

Meloncello has no menu (a rather quaint twist that I really like), and we let the waiter know we wanted to eat whatever he thought was best. Maybe this was our mistake? Overall I felt like the food was “niente di speciale”, nothing special. Our meal plus waters only cost us 25 euros though, which was one of our cheapest dinner experiences during our time in Italy, so even though we were unsatisfied we didn’t pay a lot for it (not like our experience at Bistro 18 the next night!)

4 out of 10 stars for Meloncello

This experience actually had us thinking that we don’t like traditional Italian food, and over time we’d become snobby and needed a nuovo/moderno twist to our dishes like what we found at Caminetto D’oro. Later we went out into the Tuscan countryside and realized it wasn’t us, it was Meloncello/Bologna/the commercialization of the restaurants. When traditional Italian food is done superbly, it will blow your mind.

After our disappoint meal at Meloncello, we wanted to end the night with some gelato. It was here that we found our favorite gelato in Bologna, at a place called Venchi. Venchi is famous for it’s chocolate, and thus the chocolate flavored gelato here is superb. I ordered Crema Venchi, Cuor di Cacao, and Ciocco Cocco. This is one of the few true artisanal gelato places we found during our time in Italy, most have nearly identical menus leading me to believe that they have their gelato trucked in from somewhere. Another bonus for Venchi is that it’s right next to Tamburini and the main piazza, and so we were able to go the next night as well. The second time I had Cioccolato azteco, Ciocco coco, and Fior di latte superior. We ducked into the shade of a store window and dove into our cups and cones as the tourists walk by. That is pure Italian magic to me.

9 out of 10 stars for Venchi

Bistro 18 was another location I had really high hopes for. The website said dinner wasn’t served until 8, but I think it was served even earlier. Dining room was very cool, and it felt nice to be in a light wrap sweater with strange almost-erotic art comics hanging on the walls. We paid 70 euros for several courses, no dessert and no drinks.

Perfectly ripe cantaloupe
Stale bread (from an American perspective), no olive oil served with it
Goat cheese salad. Amaze. Heavy on the croutons and I would like more lettuce, but the crispy heaping round of goat cheese was perfect.
Brodo, a traditional Italian dish, was not anything to write home about. Noodles in salty broth?
The sheep pasta was the saltiest dish I’ve ever had. I could only eat a few bites, though I did like the slight al dente of the pasta.
TH had the veal. Slightly overdone on edges, kind of nice paired with the tomato. Last year we spent some time in Vienna though, and this failed miserably in comparison to the schnitzel there.

5 out of 10 stars.

This meal was the saltiest I’ve ever had, and I was prepared to give it 4 stars but the goat cheese salad won me over. My sheep pasta was so bad, I considered sending it back to the kitchen (though I was full so I decided not to).

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After deciding to visit Bologna due to the number of people raving about the culinary options, I was very disappointed. I was frustrated that time spent planning did not seem to be paying off the way I thought it would. As I said in my previous post about Bologna, I can’t really think of a reason I would personally tell someone that they needed to carve out time in their budget for. Caminetto D’oro and Venchi were wonderful, but there is much more where that came from in other areas of Italy.

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