TIME EUROPE
August 21, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 8
A Moveable Feast for the Peckish in Milan
A century-old deli serves up the best of Italy's fine fare
By CHARLES P. WALLACE
The british writer H.V. Morton noted in his classic book, A Traveller in Italy, that Milan is the only city in the world where you can give a taxi driver the name of a famous painting and expect to be delivered to the right place. Not just any painting, mind you, but Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. So I tried a little experiment. Hopping into a cab, I said to the driver in my admittedly imperfect Italian, "Please take me to the Ultima Cena." No luck. The driver turned and in his best Brooklyn English asked: "You wanna eat pizza?"
Disappointed as I was, I told the driver to forget art and to take me to Via Spadari in the center of Milan. This is the home of Peck, which is to Italian food what the Sistine Chapel is to painting. Why worry about The Last Supper when at Peck you can have the Endless Supper? Despite its German name, Peck is a palazzo of gourmet Italian cuisine. Founded in 1883 as a delicatessen, Peck has expanded over the years into a restaurant, bar, rotisserie and wine cellar. For those who love Italian food, a visit to Peck is a rare treat, an ideal place to while away a broiling summer afternoon in Milan.
Start on the ground floor of Via Spadari 7, home of the Bottega del Maiale (pork shop) and the Casa del Formaggio, the house of cheese.
The shop is immense — the size of a football field. Counter after counter is laden with such delicacies as smoked and raw ham, salamis and other sausages. You can find smoked wild salmon, and huge nuggets of truffles, worth their weight in gold. The cheese counter offers parmigiano reggiano in kilogram chunks for $17, gourd-shaped provolones and mozzarella made from water buffalo milk, bagged and floating in a bath of brine like yacht buoys for $16 a kilo. "A lot of shops offer cheeses but we use only the finest ingredients," says Lino Stoppani, one of four white-coated brothers who control Peck these days.
The ground floor also features a bakery and a homemade pasta shop, offering such staples as ravioli stuffed with ricotta and spinach or fettucine with a taste of saffron. Like everything else in this shop, the pasta is made to be taken away, and will be a welcome and unusual gift when you return home. Upstairs at Via Spadari is the coffee and tea room, with more than 30 different roasts from around the world, while the basement houses Peck's wine shop. Because of the 600 types of wine stored there, the room is kept delightfully cool — a huge attraction in the hot summer months, when you can chill out and sample fine wine at the same time.
Another treat for visitors is the rotisserie, located around the corner on Via Cesare Cantù. Here chickens are roasted over an open wood fire, and hot meals are prepared for takeaway (far better than any room service). On offer are traditional dishes such as lasagne with bechamel and specialties like cannelloni stuffed with pumpkin.
Across the street from the rosticceria, on the corner of Via Armorari, is a small sign commemorating the fact that Ernest Hemingway was carried to an American Red Cross hospital located here during World War I. His experiences quaffing the local vino and vermouth became the basis for A Farewell to Arms. If that isn't enough history for you, then head to Piazza Santa Maria delle Grazie. There in a small Dominican church is the real Last Supper.
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