Today we went to lunch again at Al Duomo, our favorite restaurant. We branched out from our usual suspects, and the new to us dishes were a hit.
Since we will be able to go to Al Duomo a few times this trip, we decided that we could try some of their other dishes, ones that we hadn’t tried before. (They may or may not have had these dishes in the past.)
The first (=pasta) course was gnocchi with a kale pesto on a bed of pumpkin cream. It was topped with what may have been turnip seeds, though with a mix of English and Italian in the explanation, we weren’t sure. Adding to the confusion was the term for kale cavolo nero (lit. black cabbage). I thought it might mean “red cabbage”, and the dictionaries were of no help. Finally, L discovered that cavolo nero is kale, which information we duly relayed to the owner F (since all they had found was “black cabbage”). Here’s the tasty result:
The second (=meat/fish) course was cotechino, a traditional pork sausage, on a bed of (regular) cabbage. On the side was a very traditional Veronese sauce, called pearà. We’ve had, and liked, both cotechino and pearà in the past, but they didn’t work together for us, since the pearà masked the cotechino flavors. When I said something to the friendly owner F, she laughed and said “We Veronese put pearà on everything!”
While we love Verona, I guess there are some limits to how Veronese we are.