Mama is impressed.
She's visiting from Toronto. I've taken her to La Quercia, one of the most authentic regional Italian restaurants Vancouver has ever seen.
We're digging into a fatty hunk of grilled pork belly, served with a charred wedge of polenta and raw fennel-radish salad.
Mama loves the buttery texture of the meat, with its smoky flavour and crackling rind. She says she's never eaten pork like this before.
Surprising? Not really. My mother is a fisherman's daughter from a coastal town in Latina, the southernmost province of Lazio in central Italy.
This hearty plate of pork belly and cornmeal, like many of the dishes at La Quercia, is typical of Trentino-Alto Adige, one of the northernmost regions of Italy, where the cuisine has far more in common with neighbouring Austria than it does with Rome.
Funny, isn't it? Italian is one of the most popular foods in North America. But there's no such thing as generic "Italian" cuisine. The country is made up of 20 regions and each has its own specialties, with a multitude of village-specific subsets in between. The red sauces, deep-dish pizzas and eggplant lasagna that we in North America have come to love are about as traditional to Italy as chop suey is to China.
Italian food is really all about regional Italian food. Yet there aren't any restaurants in fusion-friendly Vancouver that have remained loyal to any one area of the boot-shaped map. Even our so-called Tuscan trattorias romp with willy-nilly abandon from the golden coastlines of Sicily to the frigid shores of Salt Spring Island.
And now along comes La Quercia, a 32-seat restaurant on the western outskirts of Kitsilano that has rooted itself in one of the most obscure regions in all of Italy.
The kitchen isn't entirely stuck in the snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites (I didn't see any sauerkraut on the menu). But the cuisine is predominantly Northern Italian, doesn't veer much further south than the pesto-bean-potato pastas of Liguria, and is thus more regionally authentic, I would argue, than any of its peers.
What gives?
The praise goes to owners Lucais Syme and Adam Pegg. The hard-core regional enthusiasts are both alumni of the Parkside group of restaurants (Parkside, La Buca and Pied-à-Terre).
But Mr. Pegg, one of the first Canadians to complete Italcook's Slow Food - Master Italian Cooking program at the Higher Institute of Gastronomy in Jesi, Italy, boasts the specialized training in Italy's strictly delineated culinary traditions.
And his attitude is actually quite radical compared to most Italian-Canadian standards.
"I always liked my meats and big pastas and heavy flavours," Mr. Pegg later explains by phone. "Lucais did as well - he grew up in Alberta."
After graduating from the three-month program in 2003, Mr. Pegg spent another two years cooking in Italy. He did a couple of short stages in the regions of Piedmont and Abruzzo, but worked primarily in Trentino where he met his wife, front-of-the-house manager Karin Lazzari.
"I worked in hotels, where they did all kinds of dishes from all over Italy. But I didn't live or work in the South. I couldn't do that sort of cooking in my own restaurant. It wouldn't feel authentic."
Thus, La Quercia's heirloom tomato salad (one of many daily specials that supplement a short fixed menu) isn't served with buffalo mozzarella - a highly localized regional specialty of Campania and Latium in Southern Italy.
Crisply roasted Cornish hen ($23) is stuffed with canederli (bread dumplings mixed with speck and sage).
Flat-iron steak ($23) is tagliata - grilled rare, sliced and topped with a huge nest of arugula, balsamic and pine nuts.
Agnolotti di Guido ($12 for a generous primi portion) is filled with ricotta and Swiss chard and simply tossed in a richly reduced veal stock finished with butter.
And the pasta dishes share equal billing with polenta and risotto, both of which are more prevalent up north.
I love everything we eat at this lovely, unpretentious neighbourhood restaurant.
"The food might be new to some people, but it's not strange," Mr. Pegg says. "These are classic combinations. They go together for a reason."
That said, the owners understand they must still accommodate certain customer expectations.
Is that why osso bucco - a full-flavoured winter dish - appears on a summer menu?
"Yeah," says Mr. Pegg. "Personally, I wouldn't want to eat that in 25-degree weather. But that's what people want. And they're ordering it like crazy."
To each their own. Mama, for instance, isn't crazy about the chocolate-chestnut cake we order for dessert. It might be a classic dish from Trentino, but they'd never serve anything so dry in her hometown.
Family loyalties aside, I sincerely hope La Quercia (which means oak tree in Italian) sticks to its regional roots and pushes them even deeper.
La Quercia: 3689 West 4th Ave.; 604-676-1007
