Sunday, August 20, 2006

Pronto = Paradise

If you know me or have followed my blog then you can just imagine how much I miss Italy since moving to Germany a few months ago. I do like it here and there's a lot about Germany to love. But It's not Italy. I miss everything from the weather to the landscape to the places I used to spend my time to driving on the Autostrada to...well, just about everything. And if you know Italy well, you can magine how much I especially miss the food and vino. There ae a ton of Italian restaurants here and almost all of them are run by Italian emmigrants which is great because I can usually practice my Italian a little bit and get a small taste of Italy. I've managed to find a couple decent restaurants that have a couple decent Italian dishes but overall it's just not nearly as good and here's the worst part - I have not found a single restaurant or pizzeria up here that produces a pizza even remotely resembling the pizza in Italy. And considering that we usually ate pizza at least once or twice a week down there, that's a big void.

However.

Recently Antonio, an Italian friend of mine (he's from Napoli) who runs the Italian bistro on the base told me about an Italian grocery store right in town and suggested I check it out. Last weekend we did and...wow. It really is an Italian grocery store, complete with just about everything we could get at the supermercato (supermarket) back in Italy! Meats, cheeses, pasta, sauces, seafood, coffee, truffles, you name it, all directly from Italy and alot of them are the exact same products we used to buy in Italy at roughly the same prices.

And the vino! There's a whole separate section for the wine and they have a decent selection from every region in Italy, also at decent prices. In fact, there are a few lesser known wines that I used to like in Italy that I've regretted not stocking up on when we left and believe it or not, I've found them at this place.

The store is officially called "Pronto" but I just call it Paradise. Now if I could just find a decent pizzeria...

(Tried to post photos but Blogger wouldn't cooperate. I'll try again later.)

1 comment:

Kitty said...

What, no German food?

That's the nice thing about America; even in the small town of Corning, NY, I can find great foods from all over the world at Wegmans.

I saw this great show on TV recently about pizza in America. Its history and which city makes the best: NY or Chicago. I salivated the entire 60 minutes.

Been to Pirmasens lately?