*Dell'Anima & S

Many people, including Dana have raved about Dell'Anima so I was thrilled that S suggested we have our dinner there (instead of attending this panel on women in business). Dell'Anima is the love child of two very young prodigies - Gabe Thompson and Joe Campanale. Gabe was last at the much esteemed Le Bernardin (this is perhaps the closest that I will get to Le Bernardin) and Joe worked with Mario Batali and is a frequent contributor to food and wine publications.

We deserved some R and R in these trying economic times. It's been quite a roller coaster ride. I was getting emails left and right about JPMorgan and WaMu - crazy! Switching seamlessly from business to personal matters, S and I see eye to eye on a lot of things. Our significant others even have similar traits. We were both thrilled at being seated right at the open kitchen - their equivalent of a sushi bar. We both started pulling our hair into ponytails. S said, "tie the feedbag on!"

A note about sitting and watching the chefs. Call me naive but I like to think of kitchens as very sanitary with everyone wearing gloves and hairnets. As we've seen on the Foodnetwork and as S has correctly pointed out, most of us cook with our bare hands. I certainly do. She said, "take for example the chef salting the fish, wouldn't you like to feel the grains of salt and control the amount? Cooking requires all five senses." Yes. And maybe I won't watch the chefs going forward because they scratch their heads and their noses and those same hands are salting, poking meat to see how done they are and covering the tops of olive oil bottles to control the flow of liquid.

Seeing that certainly didn't stop me from scarfing down everything we ordered. We got all 5 of their famous bruschette. I could eat the chickpeas and preserved lemon one for days (def try the tomato bread at Boquerria). Another one of my favorites was done quite well: arugula, lemon, shaved parmigiano reggiano salad. Yum (my favorite ever was in Melbourne where they served it with "rocket lettuce"). We at first ordered 2 pastas but that was just the hunger talking. Luckily, they just served us the tagliatelle alla bolognese. Oh, I love the beautiful wide ribbons of noodles and the little clusters of ground meat. The pasta also had a shot of spice and the balance and heat were really lovely.

And why stop? Let's live it up while the economy collapses around us! I had 1 Lactaid left so we got the marscapone panna cotta with figs. S and I love marscapone, panna cotta, all things fluffy creamy - whipped cream and creme fraiche. This was lovely and yes, I took the bullet. Lactaid, don't fail me now.

www.dellanima.com