Ciao Budapest (III): We’re Not Just Italian, We’re Ligurian!

Our first-ever “Italy Week” continues with a trip to Peccati di Gola, which recently opened up on a busy but often overlooked street in inner Pest. Which may be an appropriate location, because it specializes in cuisine from a busy but often overlooked region of Italy.

Liguria (the map above) is a thin strip of picturesque land wrapped around the Gulf of Genoa. The proprietor of Peccati di Gola, Raimondo Mendolia (pictured inside the map) is a not-so-thin but very cheerful and energetic devotee of Ligurian food married to a Hungarian woman who makes fresh pasta somewhere out in the countryside for the restaurant. While we didn’t make it to Liguria on our trip to Italy last week, we know enough to be able to tell that the menu at Peccati di Gola is Ligurian enough for the place to be called Ligurian. So here’s what we had. We started with a nice selection of antipasti selected by Mendolia (above). This turned out to include an order each of prosciutto and melon (Ft 1,550), bresaola (air-dried beef) and arugula (Ft 1,650), and a mixture of marinated octopus and swordfish (Ft 1,850).

Then came another mixture, this time of pastas: gnocchi with gorgonzola and radicchio (Ft 1,550), ravioli stuffed with porcini and truffles (Ft 2,660) and another ravioli-like pasta with a meat sauce we can’t rightly remember (Ft 1,750). All were tasty, though one person at the table thought the pasta was a bit undercooked. But keep in mind that Italians like their pasta pretty toothy.

We then finished up with two pizzas – so much for the Atkins diet! – also selected with the help of the boss. One was the “Peccati di Gola” (foreground, Ft 2,180), which includes freshly-sliced tomatoes, Parma ham, arugula, pesto and, instead of mozzarella, a layer of stracchino, a creamy cow’s milk cheese typical in northern Italy. The other pie, which showed up on the bill as just another house pizza, was stuffed with smoked buffalo mozzarella. Both were quite fine, though we preferred the “real” Peccati di Gola pizza.

In case you are wondering, “Peccati di Gola” translates as “Sins of Gluttony.” Likewise, if you are wondering, the restaurant seems guilty of a few sins of its own. For our tastes, the music seemed way too loud and grating for a place where dinner for three like the above (plus a Ft 6,500 bottle of pinot grigio, two large bottles of water, and two espressos) can top €100. Second, there is no point in hiring an attractive, knowledgeable and positive waitress like the one who served us, and then stick a fixed service charge of 10% on the bill. (If they hadn’t, we might have rounded up to 15%.) Finally, we are pretty sure that someone at or associated with the restaurant has been engineering a voting campaign top put Peccati di Gola at the top of Caboodle’s user ratings (it was the highest-rated Italian restaurant on the list last week, until it got knocked into second place by some diners who apparently didn’t agree). But none of these sins are so grave that you shouldn’t give the place a try, especially if you are dying to consign your soul to damnation for a local night of Ligurian gluttony.