Symposium 4 Stagioni

San Lorenzo Dinner at the Symposium Quattro Stagioni – Gallery

December 28, 2008

In 2007, I won a deluxe dinner at one of Italy’s finest restaurants, and published several pages about it. Here is the full gallery of photos from that evening.

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San Lorenzo Dinner at the Symposium Quattro Stagioni: Arrival

July 23, 2007

I was one of a lucky group of people to win a dinner offered by San-Lorenzo.com as part of its marketing initiative Il Vino Lo Portiamo Noi (“we’ll bring the wine”). So what if the dinner took place halfway across Italy in le Marche? The Symposium Quattro Stagioni is one of Italy’s top restaurants, and [...]

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San Lorenzo Dinner at the Symposium Quattro Stagioni – After

July 23, 2007

We sat around for a while and drank more wine (Alessandro, Enrica, and Ernesto shown above), and played with a new gadget that my boss Fabrizio invented (Carlo came up with the wine glass trick). I had brought along prototypes to give everybody, as a market test to see how they liked it. Rossella aka [...]

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San Lorenzo Dinner at the Symposium Quattro Stagioni – Dessert

July 23, 2007

Alessio and Enrico The dessert was also amazingly complicated and took a lot of time to prepare (the staff certainly earn their keep here!). The woman above filled little glasses with a coconut sorbet-and-liqueur. Lacy chocolate cups were filled with ice cream (I wasn’t quite sure of the flavor), and then warm little chocolate muffins [...]

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San Lorenzo Dinner at the Symposium Quattro Stagioni – Secondi

July 23, 2007

For the secondi (entree course), Sara had decided to challenge her guests with a Degustazione di Frattaglie. Degustazione means “tasting” or “sampler”. Frattaglie are… innards. (I believe in English they are sometimes called euphemistically “sweetbreads”.) This used to be considered peasant food: the parts of the animal left over after the nobles had taken the [...]

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San Lorenzo Dinner at the Symposium Quattro Stagioni – Primi

July 23, 2007

The starter was panzanella di pomodoro con scampi di Fano – tomato and bread with local scampi on a bed of arugula. As chef Lucio explained, this is a recipe inspired by the “fishermen of the hills” – those who, while owning a fishing boat down on the coast, live up in the hills, where [...]

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San Lorenzo Dinner at the Symposium Quattro Stagioni: Aperitivi

July 23, 2007

Much of the action at Symposium takes place behind the large, curved bar in the dining room, where patrons are welcome to lean over, watch, and ask questions. From the time we arrived, Danilo was busy preparing five different nibbles for the aperitivi di benvenuto. The spoonfuls shown above, designed to be reminiscent of “an [...]

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