Italy

Venice

Rome claims carbonara, and the version served in the city's trattorias runs on four things: guanciale, pecorino romano, egg yolk and black pepper. Cream belongs to the export version. Guanciale is cured pork jowl, fattier and more strongly scented than pancetta, and the fat it renders is half the sauce, so the substitution most home cooks make is the one that changes the dish most. The origin is contested. One account credits the carbonari, charcoal burners working the Apennine woods; a better-documented version places it in Rome around 1944, when American rations of bacon and powdered egg met local pasta and pecorino. The first printed recipes date from the 1950s, which is late for a dish now treated as ancient.

The whole difficulty is temperature. Egg yolks set at around 65°C, so the pan comes off the heat before the pasta meets the eggs, and the emulsion is built from rendered fat and starchy cooking water rather than direct flame. Cut the guanciale into short batons about half a centimetre thick, start it in a dry pan, and render it slowly until the fat runs clear and the edges go glassy rather than brittle. Beat the yolks with a heavy hand of grated pecorino, roughly one yolk per person plus one for the pan, until the mixture is a thick paste. Drain the pasta a minute early, toss it in the fat off the flame, wait a moment for the pan to drop below scrambling heat, then stir the egg through and loosen with cooking water until it coats.

A good carbonara is glossy and moves on the plate; it should pool slightly rather than sit in a solid mound. Scrambled curds mean the pan was too hot. A thin, watery sauce means the emulsion never formed at all. The pepper wants to be coarsely cracked and present enough to register as heat, not just as black specks. Spaghetti and rigatoni are both standard in Rome, and rigatoni carries the sauce better. Watch for the tells of a shortcut kitchen: pancetta or bacon in place of guanciale, parmesan standing in for pecorino, cream added to stabilise the sauce, or a raw yolk dropped on top for the photograph. Each is worth marking down, though the cream is the one Romans will argue about longest.

Carbonara

Dal Moro's Venice | Fresh Pasta Restaurant

Ustam yenir. Domuz etiyle ilgili bir sıkıntın yoksa bas geç. Heralde en güzel makarnalardan birisi, gerçek yağ çıtırları sevenlerin anlayacağı bir tat. Makarna kendi başına zaten güzeldi. Minnak domuz yağları da yakışmıştı. Net yenir.

A patty of ground beef cooked on a flat griddle or over a grill, served in a soft round bun with some combination of onion, pickle, lettuce, tomato, cheese and sauce: the burger has been built that way for over a century, and most of what goes wrong with it still happens at the griddle. It is an American dish with a German-sounding name: the Hamburg steak, a seasoned patty of chopped beef, was on menus in New York by the 1870s, and the bun arrived somewhere in the Midwest around the turn of the twentieth century. Several towns and fairs claim the first one and none can prove it. What is not in dispute is that White Castle in Wichita standardised the small griddled patty in 1921 and that the drive-in chains of the 1940s and 1950s made it the most widely eaten sandwich on earth. On BiteCritic the burger is rated as a dish, so a smashed diner patty and a thick pub burger are judged by the same questions: meat, cook, bun, balance.

The meat decides most of it. Chuck at roughly twenty percent fat, coarsely ground and handled as little as possible, gives a loose patty that stays juicy; lean mince packed hard turns into a dry puck. Seasoning is salt and pepper on the outside just before cooking, because salt worked through the mince tightens it like sausage. The two methods produce different burgers. On a hot flat-top the patty is smashed thin for the first thirty seconds so the whole face browns into a crust, cooked two to three minutes a side and flipped once; over a grill a thicker patty is left alone until it releases, then flipped once and taken off between 55 and 60°C at the centre for medium. Cheese goes on for the last minute under a lid or a splash of water so it melts. The bun is toasted cut-side down in the fat.

Pick the burger up before you judge it: it should hold together and not slide apart, and the bun should be soft enough to compress but not collapse. The crust on the patty is the first thing to look for; a grey, steamed surface means a cold or crowded pan. Inside, pink is right for a thick patty and irrelevant for a smashed one, which is cooked through by design. The bun should be warm and toasted, never cold or stale, and the ratio matters more than the size: a tall tower that needs a skewer is a presentation choice, not a better burger. Mark down dry meat, a patty that tastes mainly of seasoning mix, cold cheese sitting unmelted on top, soggy bread from untoasted buns or too much sauce, and lettuce doing the structural work. Fries are a side, not part of the score.

Burger

Five Guys

Ustam tamam et et yiyoruz fıstıklarımızı çıtlatıyoruz patates zaten menüye dahil değil sınırsız kolanın binbir çeşidi mevcut nerden tutsak türklere hitap etmeyen pahalı bir mevzu. Tekrar da gitmem.

Tomato, mozzarella, basil and olive oil on a thin disc of slow-fermented dough, baked in under two minutes in a wood oven until the rim puffs and blisters: the pizza Margherita is the version of Neapolitan pizza against which every other pizza is measured, because it has nowhere to hide. The story Naples tells is that the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito made it in 1889 for Queen Margherita of Savoy in the colours of the new Italian flag; historians have found earlier mentions of the same combination, and the royal letter is of doubtful authenticity, but the name has stuck for over a century. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana has defined it since 1984: crushed San Marzano or other plum tomatoes, fior di latte or mozzarella di bufala, fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil and salt, on a dough of flour, water, salt and yeast. Nothing else is a Margherita, whatever the menu says.

The dough is hydrated to around sixty percent, kneaded smooth, fermented for eight to twenty-four hours and shaped by hand from a ball of about 250 grams into a disc of 30 to 35 centimetres with the air pushed to the rim. The tomato is crushed raw with salt and spread thin in a spiral, leaving the cornicione bare. The mozzarella is torn or cut into strips, drained well so it does not flood the base, and scattered sparingly; buffalo mozzarella goes on in smaller pieces, sometimes after the first minute of baking. A few basil leaves and a thread of oil go on before the pizza slides into the oven, where the floor runs at around 430 to 480°C and the dome hotter. Sixty to ninety seconds, turned once, and it is out, served whole and uncut, to be eaten with a knife and fork or folded a portafoglio in the hand.

Judge the rim first: it should be puffed and soft, leopard-spotted with char, airy inside and not bready or dense. The centre should be thin and tender, slightly wet where the tomato and cheese meet, soft enough to fold but with enough structure to lift a slice. The tomato should taste fresh and bright, the mozzarella melted into islands with a little milk around them rather than a uniform rubbery sheet, the basil wilted but present, the oil tasting of olives. Mark down a pale rim, a cracker-crisp base, a soggy grey centre from a cool oven or too much topping, cooked tomato sauce with herbs or sugar in it, grated cheese that has gone oily, dried basil, and a pizza that has waited long enough for the base to stiffen. The Margherita is where a pizzeria shows whether its dough and its oven are right, and no amount of toppings on the other pizzas will compensate.

Rank	Place	Top dish	Reviews	Score
1	Dal Moro's Venice \| Fresh Pasta Restaurant Rugagiuffa, 4864, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy Top dish: Carbonara	Carbonara	1	9.071 review
2	Five Guys Fondamenta Santa Lucia, binario 1, 30121 Venezia VE, Italy Top dish: Burger	Burger	1	6.501 review
3	Venice Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy Top dish: Pizza Margherita	Pizza Margherita	1	6.041 review

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