Steak - Mark Schatzker [74]
The best bistecca Falorni ever ate was in the mid-1990s. It was one of his own, aged in the family fridges and consumed at an extremely expensive winery and hotel called Borgo San Felice. (He brought the oak.) Falorni ages his beef loins for up to fifteen or twenty days—sometimes up to a month—and Borgo San Felice extends the period of frolatura for up to another three weeks. The hotel is, in fact, an ancient farming hamlet of small stone buildings that has been refurbished to a state of high luxury. You find it in the heart of Chianti, which is world-famous wine country, within which the wines of Borgo San Felice command a great deal of respect. Wealthy people from all over visit so that they may drink wine they adore while surrounded by the hillsides that produced the grapes. Invariably, they eat bistecca.
Borgo San Felice seems to have been created with the intention of proving that money can buy happiness outright. It would take the average working person a week’s earnings to spend a single night there, but a single night offers considerably more pleasure than a week of work does in pain. The views of classic Tuscan countryside—vine-covered hills, stone houses, olive groves, cypress trees—set the standard for what would be a visual cliché if it weren’t all so lovely. But the very best view at Borgo San Felice is the one that unfolds when you enter the dining room: a wood fire burning under an iron grill—height adjustable—in front of which sit, on a platter bedded with fresh herbs, several of the thickest T-bones you ever did see. To call these pieces of meat “slabs” is to be generous to the term slab. These are not standard bisteccas. In Tuscany, a T-bone of such stellar thickness has its own name: bistecca alla fiorentina—a Florentine steak. To qualify, the chop must be the width of two ribs, which, in the case of the world’s largest beef breed, works out to at least two and a half inches. The steaks are so big you could use one as a plate on which to eat a normal-sized steak. Although most guests end up sharing one with a like-minded partner, some do opt to keep an entire bistecca alla fiorentina all to themselves. Unlike at the Big Texan, there is no countdown clock, no vomit pail, and no one gets it free.
The general manager at Borgo San Felice is an attractive and elegant woman named Cinzia Fanciulli who is friendly to the point of disarming. (Attractive Italian women do not generally suffer from haughtiness or inflated egos, as in other countries, which is yet another factor contributing to Italy’s greatness.) She offered to share a bistecca alla fiorentina with me—but not immediately, as the fire under the grill had just been ignited, she pointed out, and the bed of coals would not be thick enough, white enough, or hot enough for two hours, minimum.
When two hours had passed, there was the small matter of first courses. Dinners at Borgo San Felice are a grand exercise in service à la russe, a procession of pure savors as ordered as a Catholic mass and just as long. They build from subtlety to grandeur, climaxing with the bistecca.
We began with a tasting of olive oil, a blend of four olive varieties that looked like liquid amber, smelled of chopped fresh herbs, and possessed undeniable notes of toasted nuts, so much so that anyone with a nut allergy should probably have an EpiPen handy. The olives were grown on the same land that produced the tomatoes featured in the next course, an old peasant soup called pappa al pomodoro, which was the most incredibly tomatoey substance I have ever put in my mouth. This