If you are looking for stellar Italian food that is not your typical big bowl restaurant you must try Bacco Ristorante.  One night my Bride and I were at Bacco with her sister and her husband.  This couple is from Louisville, who we visit or we see here and always enjoy some great food and some great wine, in what ever state we are in.  I have mentioned Bacco Ristorante in passing in another article, while discussing his Pizzeria Biga.  Tonight we shall talk about a couple of dishes that are stellar and have to be tried.

I have to have the Beef Carpaccio as an appetizer when I am there, sometimes they have a more exotic offering of this classic dish, but then I just request the classic version and they have always honored my request.  The meat is so thinly sliced, along with the Reggiano de Parma and a wonderful Truffle Oil, that I could wax poetic for hours on end on this dish alone.  The other dish that I want to mention tonight is the Veal Chop which is always perfectly prepared.  It is so well executed and properly cooked that I have stopped ordering a Veal Chop anywhere else.  After all why settle for second best, when you can the best.  A little side note on more exotic cuts of meat, when the order is being taken and the question arises, about how you would like it cooked, I always reply that however the chef likes his done.  This always seems to get me perfectly cooked meat every time.

Now about the wine that evening that the four of us enjoyed.   Bacco Ristorante has one of the largest selections of Italian wines, one could ever find.  The selection goes the gamut from the basic wines to very esoteric choices, and in a large range of price points to make everyone happy.  This particular evening we saw a wine from a new winery in Napa Valley called Darioush, which is the Persian spelling of Darius, which is the name of one of our children.  My Bride was not going to miss trying this wine (she might have, if it had been in the upper stratosphere of pricing, but it was not).    This wine was a finely crafted Cabernet Sauvignon with a taste of the Old World, as compared to a lot of the California Cabernet Sauvignon wines.  It was strong, and deep, tannic and had an “in your face” type of defiance, and everybody enjoyed this wine.  In fact we enjoyed the second bottle of the Darioush Cabernet Sauvignon even more than the first bottle.

I later found out how much my Bride enjoyed this wine, because that Christmas my Bride spoiled me with a six-pack of this wine; and she also bought me a bottle of the Darioush Chardonnay, but that is another story.