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03/06/2002 Archived Entry: "In Rome: Diane Seed and La Rosetta"

Here’s another quote from my recent trip to Italy:

“I came to Rome for a man. I stayed for the food,” said Englishwoman Diane Seed when I asked her how she happened to be living in Rome for the last 32 years.

She’s still friendly with the Italian man, although she never married him. She is still in love with Italian food, which you may be aware of, as she has written seven colorfully and delightfully illustrated books on the subject. The first is called The One Hundred Top Pasta Sauces, and it has sold nearly 2 million copies in the several languages it has been translated into.

Diane lives in a large, high-ceilinged, truly magnificent apartment in the Palazzo Doria Pamphili. The Doria Pamphili is one of the most prominent families of Rome, and their palazzo is one of the most well-known. Among other important apects, the palazzo houses a gallery with the family's collection of paintings, including two Caravaggios and the famous Velasquez portrait of Pope Innocent X, a relative. The vast building was started in the 15th century, then added on to and made more elaborate over the next 300 years. What we see now is an 18th century façade.

Centrally located near the Piazza Venezia, the palazzo has a history of housing foreigners. During the 18th and 19th centuries, English people on what was called The Grand Tour, meaning a voyage of Continental education and discovery, stayed in the building. Nowadays, the family is very particular about the people to whom they will rent, preferring artistic types and other people who do things, unusual things.

Diane politicked her way into the palazzo, then discovered that her apartment was an oven in the summer. Unlivable. She can’t put in air-conditioning because she lives in the front of this historic building, and she doesn’t like to open the windows because the street is noisy and sooty from car traffic. So she managed to get a second apartment, upstairs and set back enough from the façade that air-conditioning is allowed.

The second apartment is where she has her cooking school. She also teaches cooking in Sant’ Agata sui due Golfi (Saint Agatha between two Gulfs), a name that refers to the town being situated high on the Sorrento peninsula where you supposedly can see both the Gulf of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno simultaneously. I have been taken to this very point in the town and would like to report that this view is impossible. You have to look from one side then to the other, walking about 50 feet as you do, to see the two bodies of water. You cannot see them together. But I digress. Diane Seed also teaches cooking in Puglia, in a town on the Adriatic Sea called Monopoli, at what looks from its printed material like a gorgeous inn called Il Melograno (The Pomegranate). Diane says it is very gorgeous, and I believe whatever Diane says. She is a straight-shooter and we share the same enemies.

We had a drink in Diane’s pink and turquoise-accented drawing room, then got a look at her personal kitchen and bathroom. She had to install these herself, and what a job she did. In Italy, I am so accustomed to seeing either dilapidated old kitchens or sterile, severely contemporary kitchens, that it was refreshing and reassuring to see a new kitchen that had all the modern appliances but substance and personality. It looks homey and practical, tucked into a relatively long, narrow space – just like a good New York kitchen. The bathroom is an extravaganza of mosaic work. The walls and floors are covered in tiles that form a fantasy of the sea full of sea creatures. Diane is a Pisces. Of course.

Given her astrological sign, Diane should have loved the restaurant I’d chosen to take her for dinner, La Rosetta, which is considered the top seafood restaurant in Rome. I wanted to go out of curiosity, even though Diane had warned me that it is one of the most expensive, if not the single most expensive restaurant in the city. It is not the kind of restaurant I would normally choose to go to on a trip, not because of the cost but because it is rarefied food, not typical food. But it is owned by the family of a friend of mine in New York, and I have to admit I was curious about what the top seafood restaurant in Rome would be like. You might say it is the Le Bernardin of Rome.

There is no quibbling about the spectacular freshness and quality of the ingredients. Fish simply can’t be better. As guests of the house, however, we were sent out a stream of plates with tastings of many raw fish – tiny red shrimp in balsamic vinegar, sea bass with blood orange, a tuna tartare with capers … like that. In general, I think we do these raw fish things better in the U.S., where we have more experience with them and more exposure to Japanese food, which is their inspiration.

A salad of lobster, tiny shrimp, red onion, potato, and basil was memorable, however. And we all remarked on how we could eat the warm salad of grilled octopus with potatoes until kingdom come. Calamaretti, tiny squid, with grilled radicchio and raisins was a strikingly delicious combination. And I rather liked the pasta I insisted on eating, spaghetti with gambaretti (yes, more tiny shrimp) and grated pecorino, sheep's milk cheese.

One of my gastronomic missions on this trip was to discover when Italians use cheese with seafood, which has become taboo in the states among those in the supposed know, although not a rule that is strictly adheared to in the Italian south.

I had experienced seafood and cheese before in Italy (and knew, during the next week, that I would be in for many cheese-seafood experiences in Puglia), but wondered how it would be done here, at La Rosetta, a bastion of seafood cookery. I loved the slightly sour, salty taste of the pecorino with the sweet shrimp, but I was a minority of one at my table of four. Diane thought the cheese overwhelmed the shrimp. Bob went further, declaring that the cheese ruined the dish for him. Iris was more diplomatic. She thought the dish had too much cheese, but might have worked if it had less.

We finished our meal with red mullet with fennel, and a few huge shrimp that were lightly battered and fried with their heads still on. I thought the kitchen really showed its stuff with the careful handling of those.

The quietly contemporary restaurant, just two smallish rooms, was full of a smartly, mainly informally dressed young-ish crowd; not kids but in their 30s or so. Many of them were eating seafood stew and I envied them. I think if we had not started with all the raw fish dishes, we would have thought La Rosetta was as thoroughly great as many Romans think it is.

Here are the particulars to contact Diane Seed, to find out about her cooking classes:

Diane Seed’s Roman Kitchen
Via del Plebiscito, 112
Roma 00186
tel. 39.06.6797103
fax 39.06.6797109
website: www.italiangourmet.com
e-mail: dianeseed@compuserve.com

Ristorante La Rosetta
Via della Rosetta, 8/9
00186 Roma
tel. 06.6861002 or 06.68308841
fax 06.68215116
www.larosetta.com
larosetta@tin.it