It is so strange, and it gets even “stranger and stranger” (c) to visit in Italy, in Rome, the restaurant of a Moscow chef!

But, following the principles of the same great text, then everything became “curiouser and curiouser” (c).

Nino is well-known to all the gastro-Moscow and I don’t know any chefs, either fashionable or tasty ones, who don’t truly respect him and consider his restaurant “Semifreddo” at least respectable.

And to my taste, those who don’t agree, if any, should definitely go fuck themselves.

Here in Via Condotti, overlooking Fendi, in the den of luxury and untamed tourists he has suddenly opened his Osteria Siciliana. A tiny, hypercozy restaurant, as white as the Moscow snow two days a year.

We enter. The place is full at nine o’clock.

Laughter, hubbub, the darting of little glances. Everything is as it should be in a regular Italian restaurant in Italy.

We sit down.

Only two people, Nino’s wife and his daughter, serve. In person. No hostess/waiters. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be stylish enough.

The menu is such that you wish to have half of it at once and this is a real problem. Fortunately, for example, pastas are traditionally served half portion, so you can try many kinds at a time.

For appetizers we had Sicilian ruby shrimp crudo (how can you do without it?), octopus salad and cod-chickpeas mousse with a hardly pronounced name.

Everything was wildly delicious. Starting from the shrimps, which were initially fucking awesome, in a very nice sauce, up to an obscure cod mousse, with a stop at the excellent, not sluggish or over tortured as usual, but quite a vigorous octopus, snow-white on cuts/fissures.

In favor of pasta, I’d say that it is a completely thing here. Everything the way I love it, high-class: there is almost no sauce, nothing is floating in it, but the spaghetti itself has absorbed so much taste that you can eat it on its own. Langouste pasta was perfect, as well as a really good pasta with bottarga (for those who love bottarga, of course).

Then there were a couple of fish plates, Sicilian-style, simple and understandable, which didn’t make them less tasty: tuna tornado with comfiture and swordfish with vegetables.

For dessert, instead of something sweet, we traditionally had another half pasta each, black with cuttlefish and white with grouper, to which there was only one claim: they were not as fucking delicious as scampi pasta, but simply damn good.

P.S. One more bonus: by some reason any super champagne Krug costs here 240 Euro, which is almost a duty free price.

P.P.S. Before you decide whether it is expensive/not expensive, subtract 240eur from the check, look at the pictures with all we had below and keep in mind the bottle of white wine.