Pizza wise, Santa Lucia is great. They do take-aways too. Beats Dominoes any day - which is a place I consider to just fill your stomach. Having said that, I am strangely addicted to their garlic bread here

All this talk of modifying frozen pizzas and all...I miss the buitoni pizza dough in Switzerland.



Pick your sauce (I'd break from tradition and use a creamy garlic sauce, yum!), add your toppings and bake. Very easy and very tasty. They need to sell these in the UK

That reminds me of a business dinner with a German vendor there:

"I'd like to have pizza number 24."

"Er, that is not an ID, it's the price."

Same here, always with salami, it's so cheap too. Makes a full meal!

Dominos is definitely near the bottom of the quality pizza list in the US. My favorite pizza in Zurich was at Miracle. Very thin but very good. I admit I did not regularly sample all pizzas in Zurich. My best Pizza ever was in Como Italy, don't remember the place, but it was heavenly, it was an Italian restaurant not specialized in pizza.

There are a few lowprice-restaurants around, offering good pizze at reasonable prices (examples are one at Limmatplatz, or the Restaurant Bahnhof in Glattbrugg). For real Turkish Kebabs, go either to the Marmara-Manesse at Manessestrasse in Zürich or to the Bodrum in Rüschlikon, for real Arab Kebabs you have the choice between Palme de Beirut at Bertastrasse, Cèdre at either Badenerstrasse or at Schifflände, the Sultan at Hönggerstrasse 120 or the Tifo at General-Wille-Strasse 18 near Bhf Enge.

But I anyway prefer Spaghetti or a Piccata Milanese or some Italian lamb specialities, when eating Italian. I generally avoid the "chains" however.

In "classic" Italian cuisine, the Pasta is the 1st of two main courses, but this of course is geared for the relatively wealthy. For a good part of the Italian population, it simply always was either pasta as THE meal or meat/fish with pasta or noodles as side-things. The budget-variant therefore of course was a kind of pasta. The best option in Italy of course is if you get invited for meal by a family where the Mamma is a professional cook

Sure, particularily from people who fail to realize that there in the USA are almost as many people of Italian origin than Italians in Italy

"American Pizza" to some extent clearly is, therefore, an Italian success-story, even if those immigrants ages ago have become US citizens and so regard their success quite correctly as a "US-American success story" !

That's wise.

You wouldn't want to get them stuck in your teeth...

That stuff has nothing to do with turmeric. It is a mix of cream, some curry flavour and safran (for the colour).

Turmeric, then.

Certainly!

The Ancient Greeks and the Romans were both known to make flat breads ("plakos"?), with added herbs, oils n stuff to give it some flavour - these flat breads have been traced back to neolithic times in origin.

Despite Wolli's wildly inaccurate (yet oft-repeated) claim that the origin of pizza is "leftovers", the modern pizza's origin can be identified as The Great Step Forward Of Italian Cuisine, when some einstein of a Neapolitan -. whilst sitting on his vespa on his way to work at the Department Of Loud Shouting And Violent Gesticulation - thought the unthinkable and slopped some tomato sauce onto flat bread.

Thanks to such inspiration and insight, the world of toasted cheese would never be the same again. We salute you, Albert Neopolitan.


BTW, a bit before that, round about the 12th Century AD, an Italian called Parco Molo introduced spaghetti to the Far East, where it became known as "noodles".
These noodles became so popular in China that the Chinese actually stooped so low as to fake their own history, to make it look like they had invented noodles around the 4th or 5th Century BC, thus beating the Italians to it by some sixteen thousand years

We salute you, Porco Malo.

If you want to hear more about how Italians pioneered the cooking of vegetables and meat in hot water - an invention in the vanguard of culinary achievement that would later come to be known as "soup" - don't hesitate to ask.

HTH
___7th Earl of Sandwich (Mrs.)

Yes and No. I recently bought real Turmeric, which is clearly different from the Safran/Saffron sold here. Really bad however is that many Swiss restaurants who have some "curry meals" on the menu use the kind of "Baby-Curry" which contains a lot of cream and only some ounces of the mildest Migros Curry available !

I shouldn't imagine they do raclette very well in the Punjab, either.

Unless the owner is a native Swiss, or a Punjabi who grew up in Lausanne or Sion or Fribourg or Neuchâtel. True, but what I detest is that many Swiss restaurant owners mentally still are in the 1950ies, and fail to understand that much of their clientele nowadays is well acquainted with Indian and Chinese cuisine. The situation over the past 20 years HAS improved to some extent, but more improvement is the demand of the day. Beside the point that the Swiss gastronomy in particular and Switzerland in general much depends on Inbound tourism which is, just behind the export industry, the money earner nr 2 !

Well: The touristic places are actually aware of this. I had better Chinese food in Zermatt than in any Swiss city. (And I have recently heard that the Thai food there is also the real deal vs the watered down Zurich version.) I'd bet it is the same in St. Moritz and Gstaad - they simply have the customers that would not accept the stuff an average Zürcher is willing to pay for.

Very true: some of the best Indian food I've ever had in Switzerland was in a Punjabi restaurant in Interlaken: food cooked by Indians for Indians, and not a jar of "curry powder" to be seen anywhere in the establishment.

... and better yet, not a single middle-aged European woman in a sari, neither!

Damn! I must have missed that episode of The Ascent Of Man - the one where Prof Brunow covered the myriad hidden intricacies, the unexpected difficulties and subtle challenges inherent in this, the veritable zenith of of mankind's achievements; namely, boiling some spuds, chucking them and a couple of pickles on a place, and dumping melted cheese on top.


The aliens we met at the weekend had a brief high technology exchange sessiobn with us before they left - they gave us the blueprints for a new terror weapon made using a bizarre chemical process. They basically said that proteins extracted from animals could be congealed and stored until chemically unstable, then placed in a heavy reaction vessel and combined with anaerobically-produced ethanol and carbohydrates of vegetable origin, at a high temperature.
Late in the reaction process, lumps of antique, dehydrated, aerated vegetable starch are intermittently added, and the whole thing unleashed on an unsuspecting publics' stomachs.

These WMDs (Wedges of Molten Detritus), are expected to cause a lot of pain, upset and heartburn to a lot of people, but hey, business is business, after all.

The aliens told me this this just before they left; in fact, just when we were about to say our fond adieus, so that's what I've decided to call it - "Goodbye Money".

The scientists at JPL (the Jeem Peptic Laboratories) are already well on the way to developing the next generation of this WMD - they propose to add a number of ancient sets of naturally-occurring fibres twisted into bundles into the existing mix. This new variant will be known by its chemical formula, namely "Goodbye Money - 4 (Old Rope)"

In return, they think I gave them a food recipe, but little do they realise that I actually gave them instructions for the fabrication of weapons-grade spätzli.
.

Wolli, there is turmeric in there: fact. I can taste the bitterness anywhere. You really think out of the two yellow spices in the world they're using the most expensive, rather than the cheapest?

Where did the tomato come from?