Eccolo Restaurant and the Truffle

Ahhhh...my favorite thing to critique, criticize, whine and moan about...restaurants.

Tonight I had the spit-roasted chicken with black truffle stuffed under the skin $24. Whenever I see the word truffle AND it refers to the mushroom, my husband braces himself for my reenactment of a hog on the first day of truffle-hunting season. My husband starts looking like an oak tree to me..."surely, he must be hiding some truffles from me," I think. It is no wonder the ancient Greeks and Romans considered it an aphrodisiac. To get a more explicit version of why the pigs get so randy, check out Johnny Acton & Nick Sandler's book aptly titled Mushroom. The recipes are good and the quirkiness of the mushroom-minded subculture is irresistable.

With all of this in mind, I entered Eccolo in Berkeley, CA with high expectations and a salivating proboscis...if it could, it would. Here's how it went...
-two servers asked for my drink order twice
-waitress seemed stoned and couldn't remember my order less than one minute later
-appetizer, saffron arancini filled with fontina $8, reminded me of mozarella sticks, but shaped like testicles, with regular old pizza sauce, although it was fried to perfection, tasty but not worth $8
-and for the main course, the chicken was not moist enough and the sauce with the au gratin potatoes was worth $18 at the most. Rivoli has a similarly priced dish that I'm going to try instead - Grilled Hoffman Farm quail with hazelnut stuffing served with crispy prosciutto, jerusalem artichoke gnocchi with cream and braised tuscan kale $23. I'm rarely disappointed at Rivoli and for some reason any recipe where chicken is enhanced with a pork product calls to me. Hmmm...

To be fair, my husband liked the chicken and the appetizer. He thinks I have some childhood trauma from too much outdated chicken microwaved beyond recognition as a child. It's possible, maybe even likely.

As for chicken, I do prefer my husband's version of Donna Hay's Parmesan Crusted Chicken substituted with heirloom tomatoes from her book New Food Fast. Delicious.