On this part of the Boot everything’s always more humane. But how come to such an extent?

This is a small town that is distinguished by a peculiar “hole”™. Once a year “Red Bull” occupies it, imposing some infernal militant marketing on it, and this eventually pushes some idiots to jump in the hole.

Clearly, on this occasion the whole town is filled with crowds desperately waiting for something till the very night. This time they even had turnstiles like in the subway so it was impossible to walk around.

But don’t you worry.

It’s quite a usual kind of scum thing but a very relaxed one, typical for southern Italy. It can hardly bother you.

The restaurant we want is right opposite the jumping platform, it has a balcony and everything. Seems like they could get the most valuable benefits of such a location, but they aren’t after it.

This is a sanctuary!

We enter (with a reservation – the place is full).

We take a seat on the balcony. The short menu’s in plastic. The most expensive wine costs 22uro, the most expensive dish (apart from those that are dealt per weight) 25.

“Oh well,” we think, “now we’re going to get some incredible 10 Euro trash”

Luckily, we’re always lucky, so we’re wrong.

Ok, they bring “this”.

And this, and this. Everything’s in the price range from 10 to 25.

Ok, fuck the cost, though in Europe you can hardly find something at such a low price. Now I have to explain something. I’m a big fan of raw crustaceans/shell mollusks – the important thing is their quality.

And I can definitely say that I can’t recall having seafood of such quality before. Ok, probably, it was mere luck. Maybe it was just a nice day, but really a lucky one, because this seafood wasn’t disguised in any kind of light sauce, neither it was marinated, not even for a minute. It missed nothing; it was perfect on its own.

All the possible taste gradients were there. Starting from the taste of the sea up to the slightly sweet flavor of volgole, with all the semitones and nuances. There was no sign of “fishness”. But fuck the “fishness”, you could even hardly notice its “animalness”: it was rather like you’re having some strange sea minerals, which for un unclear reason you’d never had before.

Hey, I’ve just dedicated two paragraphs to this, uf…the description’s colorful, but indeed it’s difficult to pack it all into letters.

Well, now I want to perform a gastro-experiment: a descriptive one. For instance, this raw red shrimp has creamy flavor and consistence with almost inaudible salty and iodide notes and is sweet atop. Neither fish nor ooze, nor even “sea”, which are the most usual signs of freshness, are found in it. This means that there’re no symptoms/attributes of freshness but what we taste is the freshness itself being freshly dead. Could this be the taste of recent death?

I have to mention that this fairy tale doesn’t apply to the entire menu. For example, to my taste risotto and black pasta were “too fresh’’, they had too many details. Cuttlefishes were almost raw. No black thick sauce that I like. But this might be my subjective point of view.

However, there were EXELLENT paccheri. Al dente was almost crunchy, though it had absorbed all the broth and tomatoes. As usual, if this kind of pasta is cooked properly, you can just throw away all “the bounty of the sea” from your plate and gobble up the spaghetti on its own, as it’s supermighty and extremely convincing (the price’s just 12eur).

Then there was also scorpion fish, tasty (60eur), but it’s a digression. The main characters are pasta and crudo, that’s what you should come here for.

There’s also bonus: the sunset and the bay with rocks.

Do enjoy.