The Best Restaurant in the World
There was a standoff at high noon in Modena, but instead of guns, the appraising eyes of rich people were drawn.
There were Sven and Sigrid, both NBA-tall, possessing the cheekbones of Florentine statues, their angelic aspects capped with golden fleece.
Rolex Submariners bulged against the meaty forearms of a pair of Itali-bros, twin gym, tan and launderers with sinewy calves encased in linen pants.
Behind them, a dude in a popped collar polo and Gucci frames canoodled with a lady wrapped in a monochrome halter. She looked like a ballerina gift wrapped in a Franz Kline painting, her youth relative to polo boy suggested she’s either wife number two or mistress number one.
Including my wife and I, there are over two dozen of us ready to sit at 12 tables in three separate rooms, or as restaurants of this level call them, salons. Extraordinarily, for a group of this size, none of us is late. Though we are paying for it by dwelling in a blast furnace, the 100 degree Fahrenheit Italian heat and sun lasering sweat from our pores like the ink of a tattoo we’d like to forget, we are all early.
The night before, I barely slept. Smashed lemon tarts, old Waffles and Mochi episodes, and a long ago read New Yorker-profile of chef Massimo Bottura danced in my head. If, like my children on Christmas morning, I could wake early and force one of the best restaurants in the world to open like a Christmas gift before dawn, I would.
But Osteria Francescana, #1 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2016 and 2018, don’t play like that.
I was not in Italy for the usual reasons (art, history, shopping, pasta, pizza, gelato). Though I would partake of them, I was precisely here because of this reservation. You can tour the Colosseum on a whim almost anytime you’d like, but if you want to dine at OF, you will not be able to do so until, as of this writing, Jan 9, 2023. And even then, you will have to fight off tens of thousands of other mouse-clicking culinarily-obsessed humans and automated bots for that opportunity when the date is released. You will probably miss out.
I was resigned to lose the opportunity too. I’ll wait in a reasonable line or make some accommodation to experience greatness. But I also grew up in the era where you sometimes had to sleep on the sidewalk outside of an actual record store to score tickets to see Pearl Jam.
I am scarred from my youth and thus now subconsciously reject extremely limited supply scrambles. You will never find me at a Supreme Yeezy drop unless that’s what they name a future life-saving vaccine. This is why I missed dining at El Bulli and so far have not made it to Noma. Though I regard the culinary arts and their appraisal as my life’s calling, my crochety inner beyotch has its limits.
Like my geezer ways, the pandemic taketh, but it also giveth. I reasoned in December 2021 that surely lots of people were hedging their bets and cancelling travel and reservations to unicorn dining opportunities. I was wrong. Still, I made cursory checks of the OF website for about two weeks after that first thought, and eventually I found one poor soul, who I can only assume was murdered, had given up a reservation seven months from that day. I pounced. Reso secured, I declared that if Giraffepox was felling humanity come July 28, 2022, as long as they let me, I would wear a Bane mask, or scuba gear, or whatever was required to dine at OF.
I was sure Sigrid, Polo Gucci, and Gym, Tan and Laundry all felt the same, which is why they too were early. I was also wrong on this account, but more about that soon.
At precisely 12:30 p.m. we were not given broad relief from the heat, but instead forced to wait two by two like the animals at the Ark for our individual seating as the doors opened. The back of my shirt was already drenched like I’d done two hours of hot yoga. I could wait two minutes more. Once inside, I was relieved (based on a reasonably broad sample size over a two-week vacation) that we had found the only truly working air conditioner in Italy.
As we regarded our Beetlejuice-inspired charger plates we were asked in English whether we wanted still or sparkling. I’d been in Italy for three days already, so I’d already become American vacation douche trying too hard and responded “frizzante!”. Simon the Somm (not his real name, but he had serious glasses and a rigid mouth that suggested a cerebral Simonish-quality) just lowered his head, turned on his heel like a black Zegna-suited member of the local Carabinieri, without blinking and sighed, “Very well, sir.”
Now that I’ve set you up with anticipation and a sample of my burgeoning disappointment, this is where I’m supposed to do the ironic turn and get all bubbly (FRIZZANTE!) and tell you my meal was the greatest ever.
But there was no joy in Massimoville.
Even when the great Michelin 3 Star, 50 World’s Best restaurants are designed well, they generally express themselves in a style you might call Greige and Linen. The use muted tones and high thread counts that makes you feel as though you’re cradled in the womb of an interior designer who has been instructed to deliver comfort, but brook no creativity that would detract from the food. If the designer is given a little leeway, they express themselves through texture, statement-piece light fixtures, and a heavy batch of very expensive abstract art.
Osteria Francescana is no different in this regard. The salons are relatively tiny, almost claustrophobic by local Chicago standards of Grace, Oriole, and Alinea. There is some perspective shift and asymmetrical cants to a few of the walls that reinforce the Beetlejuice vibe. Black and white photos of old Hollywood starlets like Marlene Dietrich and what I thought was Joan Crawford mingle with expensive very colorful, some abstract, and some not abstract art. It may have been neither of the actresses, but the one I thought was Joan Crawford bore through me during the meal. Every time I took a bite of food I heard menacing screams of “No wire hangers!” in my brain.
There were two design elements I liked, one which is a light fixture that looked like the love child of an Arco Lamp and a recessed can light featuring a white metal arc that ran from the ceiling to the floor, creating a striking white halo around the patrons lucky enough to sit beneath them. Obviously, as the satanic critic, I would not be granted the privilege. The second thing I liked, well, we’ll get there later.
Just as I fought off the entreaties of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in my brain, I was assaulted by one of the GTL guidos talking loudly behind me on his cell phone. He did not walk out into the foyer, or outside. He just answered his celly mid-bite of a gossamer-light, sugar dusted Yorkshire pudding-sized cotechino sausage and lentil-studded panettone and gabbed away.
GTL’s conference call wasn’t nearly as jarring as Polo’s mistress deciding on going full carb strike at that moment and setting the tiny bread souffle off to the side like a discarded piece of spent Juicy Fruit. I love panettone so much I used to order the good ones directly from Italy before they were easily procurable from Eataly. Even if I liked this dish, it didn’t necessarily suggest it was amazing. My wife however hates them, never eats my Christmas ones, and devoured this version in seconds.
It was like Polo Gucci’s mistress had just declared to the world that Brad Pitt was ugly. Unthinkable. The servers thought so too, because they let the uneaten bread cloud linger on the table until course six before asking incredulously “Signora, are you done with this?”
The longer it was there I began to regard the panettone as a homeless orphan who’d lost both parents to Cancer two weeks apart. She desperately needed a home, which I knew I could offer with my greedy and now distracted Daddy Warbucks stomach. But Polo’s mistress just let poor little panettone perish in the gutter.
Chef Massimo Bottura, if you have seen him on TV, is all about celebrating life. Not since Roberto Benigni at the Oscars or Fabio on Top Chef have I seen an Italian express such joy of existence. This makes sense. Bottura has carved out the kind of celebrity that affords a lot of time for devotion to leisure and philanthropy.
In fact, the captains tell us that our next course, an oyster shell covered in neon orange acrylic reflects Bottura’s reflection on the plight of the oceans. The captains flick their wrists in harmony, whisking the plastic away from our crustaceans simultaneously to reveal a “sea salad”. We are told we can only see the beauty of the dish, aka the oceans, if we get serious about cleaning them up. I would have bought the whole thing if the removal of the orange ice scraper-looking thing hadn’t sopped up half the sauce and splayed whatever tweezered beauty might have been into a tangle of errant seaweed and caviar pearls. It was basically like, ‘We forced you to listen to a lecture from Greta Thunberg, so hey, rich people, we’ll now reward you with a messy pile of caviar!’
High end restaurants generally recognize that constructs like this are heavy handed and passe, so they usually focus more on the deconstruct, rebuilding a thing you know in an unfamiliar way. Francescana tries this in the following pasta course which “moves from north to south geographically on your plate” by serving three tiny ravioli one gilded with porcini dust, a perfect chicken cacciatore dumpling, and a “broken” escargot ravioli also searching for salt.
Bottura’s cacciatore evoked the moment my mom made the traditional stewed version of the dish from a Ladies Home Journal recipe in the eighties. I remember her beaming pride and how exciting and delicious it was even though I couldn’t pronounce its exotic name. This might have been a great moment in the meal, except that when they delivered the ravioli plate, they proudly told us that the escargot ravioli was cracked because it was meant to represent a “dropped” ravioli which had exploded because “chef believes that imperfection is more interesting than perfection.”
Chef is not wrong, but experience tells me a soft ravioli dropped from a reasonable height does not explode, nor does the shell convert into a wispy cracker as it does in the Francescana presentation. Still, these are minor details I don’t even regard, until the guy who told me that the restaurant doesn’t believe in perfection, comes over to the table moments later to rake the table free of errant breadcrumbs with one of those bougie silver tablecloth combs.
Speaking of perfection, it’s a fact that Americans in Italy are regarded as the least perfect. I know this because one of my fellow diners violated the sanctity of Modena’s traffic laws by not only illegally driving into the historic city center, but basically by parking their car directly outside the restaurant, the equivalent of power sliding your Ford Focus in front of Millenium Park’s bean before you go do some ice skating on the Maggie Daley ribbon.
Which table do you think the staff approached first to ask if they had parked our car in front of the restaurant? I’m not saying I maybe didn’t drive through a crowded pedway in the middle of Bath, England with my rental car three years ago, but this time in Modena, it wasn’t me. They asked all the other tables in the room, and while my money was on Gym, Tan and Laundry, they all vigorously denied the charge.
No one denied a risotto of parmesan and eggplant featuring a lacey crisp parm chip painted with dehydrated flavored powders. The glutamate content was off the charts. Even mistress lady dug into the bowl so hard, it looked like she believed there was a diamond engagement ring buried underneath the Carnaroli rice. For a moment, the room went silent save for a symphony of clinks, a festival of fork tines kissing porcelain. This beautiful moment however was ruined when a captain dumped a batch of crashing ice into a wine bucket in the dining room like he was refreshing an Igloo Cooler full of Old Styles at a frat picnic.
Heavy constructs returned in the form of phantom Bistecca alla Fiorentina. The captain tells us that chef believes the best part of the steak, the thing that everyone fights for is the meat-laden t-bone, so the restaurant has done us a favor and crushed the bones into a sauce that they pour over a braised cabbage leaf. Just to make sure they went full emperor has no clothes, they gave us a beautiful Japanese steak knife featuring a Damascus steel blade etched with trippy wavy puddle patterns to cut through a dish I could have gummed denture-less. Still, in my dreams I’m an extra in Coyote Ugly and Piper Perabo is pouring endless shots of Francescana’s delicious steak liquor straight into my gullet, but she better not be chasing it with salad and charging me (checks actual bill) $430 per person for the privilege.
I love uni as much as the next guy, but if you execute flawlessly and creatively I don’t need luxury ingredients. However, if you go child’s birthday party magician with the steak, I’m going full Clara Peller in those 1980s Wendy’s commercials and asking “Where’s the beef?”.
The bill would have been higher if like Polo Gucci and Sigrid and Sven, we’d opted for the $210 nine pour wine pairing. My wife and I are pre-fixe experts. To protect the innocent I won’t say which one of us tried to drunkenly hug Grant Achatz after a meal at Alinea and which one of us maybe prematurely had as professional competitive eaters like to say a “reversal of fortune” and deposited their entire French Laundry dinner in a trash bin in their Napa Valley B&B, but thanks to the ridiculous abundance of margin-making wine pairings these things happened in our family. We don’t do the full wine pairings at pre-fixe restaurants anymore.
We had vino, of course, by the glass, in appropriate measure. Sigrid did not. She took three trips to the bathroom. I know this sounds creepy, but we sat exactly between her table and the bathroom, and it was impossible not to note a seven-foot glamazon listing like a deckswab on the Pequod after her last trip to the loo.
Polo and his mistress were far more entertaining with their wine. They were Robert Parker-subscribing wine-magazines-are-way-better-than-novels-card-carrying oenophiles. My wife almost lost it as I aped Polo’s tasting moves, aka, the vigorous Polaroid shake swirl followed by canting his glass at an 85 degree angle toward the floor to regard the color of the juice.
At one point, I actively rolled my wine glass bowl containing a 2018 Federico Graziano Nerello red blend directly on the table like I was playing a dangerous game of spin the bottle. My exaggeration was only about 5% above Polo’s actual routine. The black cherry notes went well with the Impossible steak course though.
None of the servers smiled at my childish parody, but that’s probably because they were not looking at our table for much of the service. I always remember Ever partner Mike Muser talking about how when he ran the front of house at Grace restaurant, it was a huge pet peeve if one of his captains put their back against the wall. It meant they were relaxing and not doing their job which is to be attentive like a mother hawk who just smoked some purple kush regarding a nest of her eyas, aka babies (I had to look this up, no one knows this shit – I assumed they were called chicks- but this is a review for one of the best restaurants of the world, so I gotta keep it real).
One of the Francescana captains eventually went full Silent Bob and leaned back on the wall like she was watching her homeboy Jay bust out some Axl Rose dance moves. Both our wine glasses empty for at least five minutes, I had to do the thing I hate more than anything, aka the “garcon”, as in raise my finger like Thurston Howell III to get a refill.
As we were waiting for our dessert wines, there was a transitional course between savory and sweet called Give Greenpeace a Chance, Think Green, (chef loves the environment) featuring a sorrel and herb granita. It was delicious, a perfect cooling cleanser full of textural contrasts, but also a stark reminder that best of list restaurants are as much art as they are also just a mastered craft of a codified rubric. I have never seen sorrel in real life, but I’ve had it at any almost every Michelin 3 star I’ve dined at. I have also had a granita or sorbet as a transitionary course at all these places. This is because if you scrutinize Escoffier’s menus from 150 years ago you will see very similar dishes employed in long tasting menus.
Part of the accepted gourmet restaurant rubric includes having linen towels in the bathroom, which at this point in the four-hour meal, my bladder insisted I visit. As I finished washing my hands and deposited my linen hand towel into a basket beneath the sink in the airless restroom, I felt like the rules were being followed.
Except the other ironclad fact is when you do go to the bathroom, you usually return back to your table where you tossed your used napkin in a heap on your chair minutes earlier to find a new one folded into a lithe origami crane. Francescana did one better. When you sat down, they took a pair of tongs and gently draped them at arm’s length over your hands as if you were dining at Benihana with a communicable disease.
Except when they didn’t. When my wife came back from the restroom, there was no ceremony and no napkin for a full course, at which point she asked if she could have a napkin. The captain looked at her naked lap and back at us as though he’d just seen a scene in a Jordan Peele movie that had to be cut because it was too horrific.
She was rewarded with a napkin and a plate of “quasi” spaghetti pomodoro. It was a tangle of perfect chitarra cut noodles stained with a cherry sauce so Ferrari red, Lady Macbeth would be screaming for centuries if she got the stuff on her hands. She would also be gagging on a slightly raw tangle of flour and egg stained with Kool-Aid. This was followed by a carbonara cannoli which begs an OSHA-required sign in the kitchen that says “It has been ____ days since we mixed pasta and sugar”. The carbonara was thankfully flanked by a foie-stuffed and truffle capped macaron that might make Pierre Hermé reconsider his life’s work.
Like Thomas Keller’s oysters and pearls and Grant Achatz’s black truffle explosion or Rene Redzepi wrapping everything in hay and foraged algae, Bottura’s legend was burnished by a signature dessert called “Oops, we dropped the lemon tart!”.
Allegedly one of Bottura’s chefs dropped a more traditional lemon tart just before service and it shattered all over the floor. The chef wanted to commit seppuku, but this was the moment Bottura realized the beauty in imperfection which became his standard, and from that day forward they served a lemon tart that looked like it had been pulverized by the Incredible Hulk’s fist.
I am almost positive this is mythology in the way that the eBay founder didn’t actually build the auction site to sell his girlfriend’s Pez dispenser collection. The story has been so foundational to the restaurant’s success that a Francescana meal always ends with a riff on the concept in the same way a Keller meal begins with a salmon tartare ice cream cone. In this case, we got “Oops, we forget the caprese!” (Britney Spears Milano remix by David Guetta).
The pastry chefs had molded a faux tomato out of white chocolate, added a candied stem and stuffed the thing with real tomato pearls, i.e. tiny melon-balled-out flesh from the inside of an actual tomato. There was also a sweet mozzarella cheese sauce and the whole thing was served on a plate with faux cracks to look like it had pulverized on the floor. It took twelve courses, but they finally delivered a fully realized moment that blew my mind and rewarded my palate.
The problem is that I expected at least a handful of such genre-bending courses from one of the best restaurants in the world. They tried with sweet spaghetti and fake steak, but the execution always came up short. I don’t mind the misses. To be the greatest, you have to be willing to fail on the plate at times. One thing I’ve always appreciated about Grant Achatz of Alinea is that he serves a 20+ course meal, and is willing to push so hard, he overshoots the mark once or twice. Still, you know eighteen of the other courses are going to be perfect, fully realized, challenging, and often many of them may redefine the conventions of serveware and fine dining.
If you get #1 on the World’s 50 Best list, they kick you into the hall of fame. You don’t get to own the title on the regular list forever like you once could. My guess is in 2016 and 2018, there was a level of execution that has somehow been lost due to some snoozing on the laurel mattress. If you can no longer actually achieve number one, what are you shooting for?
The answer of course, which is how all these restaurants reach this level, is fierce and honest inward challenging of self. The pandemic has limited my exposure to this level of dining in the last couple years, but I did get a chance to check out Michael Muser and Curtis Duffy’s Ever and Jenner Tomaska’s Esme here in Chicago, and that is exactly what those guys deliver. Duffy’s molding wax sculptures as serviceware and making parsnip skulls. Tomaska had a Cheeto extruder hand built for his snacks course. Selections of wine made by Tia Barrett at Esme are chosen because they’re delicious but also often because they represent the art of underrepresented wine makers.
Ever still needs one star and Esme two to get the rarified three star label, and maybe it’s better they never do if the end product stays as lively as it is. But a meal like the one at Francescana makes you question the objectivity of a system that reveres the relative European stasis of Francescana above the constant innovation of the Midwest’s best. Ever and Esme feel like top to bottom attempts at redefining the art, while Francescana feels like Muhammad Ali fighting Larry Holmes, diminished greatness stabbing at the past with a few good punches but generally staggering around in danger most of the time.
Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee stepped in to protect Ali and stopped the fight in the tenth round. Bottura needs to do the same with Francescana. Maybe more than the food, I expected the effervescence I saw in the Massimo from TV to permeate the restaurant team. But OF was basically the house of mirthlessness.
One of the reasons I love Ever and Esme is because if the service staff thinks you want seriousness, they give it to you, but if they sense that you’re dining out because you value the experience and not the price and cache it might signal, they adjust and deliver fun. Great hospitality is not one size fits all, it’s bespoke delivery of the individual’s needs.
Toward the end of the meal, as the wine pairings kicked in, the Gym, Tan, Laundry crew murmured a little, and I even caught a giggle from Polo Gucci’s mistress, but then things generally went back to somber. The solemnity of the restaurant team infected its guests. If you don’t care, they’re not gonna care.
Just as the magnificent caprese course was being delivered to his table, Polo Gucci also took a cell call. He talked for minutes while his lady friend stared at her dessert. The captains stood sentry, heads bowed waiting for him to finish his conversation, so they could explain the dish. I am positive Michael Muser would have made the best joke in the world to diffuse the tension of that moment. Heck, he’d have found a way to end that cell call before it even started. Will Guidara, the eminent hospitalitarian, formerly of Eleven Madison Park, probably would have located a red British phone booth and had it crane lifted over the guy for that portion of the meal (deliver the unique thing the person needs). The Francescana crew just shrugged and walked away.
It was the end of the meal, so we too walked away and across the restaurant’s carpet, the second design detail I loved about Osteria Francescana. When you walk into the restaurant, the main hallway carpet features a wild floral pattern that matches the carpet in the dining rooms. The carpet in the hallway however is black and white. It transitions into bold color as you enter the dining room.
It’s a neat design trick and obviously a visual metaphor that you are now leaving the colorlessness of a pandemic-strained world and entering an arena of innovation and delight. The problem is that you leave the restaurant the same way you came in and the conceit works in reverse, which is to say as I transition back to the monochrome carpeting on my way out, I’m reminded of all the anticipatory happiness I had walking in slowly draining from my soul.
Osteria Francescana is located in Modena, Italy.
Thank you, this was a fun read.