Mucche e Buoi (Milan, Italy)

Today I want to recommend you a restaurant in Milan that I visited some times ago with my friend LC: Mucche e Buoi. We kicked off this all-meat dinner with a trio of bruschette. The first of the three breads was topped with mozzarella and friarielli, which is a vegetable known especially in Naples and Rome, also called rapini. It has many spiked leaves that surround clusters of green buds that resemble small heads of broccoli. It has a nutty, bitter and pungent flavor that goes very well with mozzarella. The second was with pepper and smoked provola, a full-fat cow’s milk cheese with a smooth skin, produced mainly in the area around the Po river in Lombardia and Veneto. The last one was garnished with lonzardo del Taburno, cured pork meat. They were all good matches and definitely an excellent way to linger whilst waiting for the main courses.

And then the mains finally arrived!

We had one of the classic dishes of the restaurant: Filetto Mucche e Buoi. Filet of a young cow covered with lard on a bed of spinach pan-fried with butter, Parmesan and cream of vinegar. The meat was extremely tender and the contrast with the crispy lard around it enhanced its savory taste. I particularly liked the pairing with the sweet, creamy and buttery spinach.

The other main we had was pork chop from a black piglet from Caserta (Campania). This indigenous specie of pork is bred in the wild, therefore the meat has a particularly rich taste. Until a decade ago, this was the most common specie of pork, but more recently it has been substituted by animals bred with more modern techniques, which lack the old fashioned taste and flavor that the black piglet has. As a side dish for this traditional meat, we had oven-baked potatoes: quite an obvious match, but it always works.

The overall look of the restaurant is cool and trendy, suiting the area where it is located, the Colonne di San Lorenzo and Porta Ticinese, where the Milanese nightlife pulses.