This past Tuesday night, all 250+ students got all dressed up and took buses to Castelfranco for a gourmet dinner. It was the first of 3 gourmet meals we will be having throughout the semester. These meals are included in our tuition costs and the director of our program, Al Ringleb, generously pays for the wine. The dinner had a total of 5 courses. The first course is appetizers (antipasta) and we all mingled in a heated tent area attached to the restaurant building and browsed through tables of appetizers and tried this and that--everything I had was delicious.
Then after about an hour or so we moved into the dining hall where round tables that seated ten people were set up. We all found a seat and immediately began pouring our first wine that was at the table (a white chardonnay). We had gone through a crash course earlier in the day about dining etiquette so we properly laid our napkins on our laps, held our wine glasses by the stem, and worked our way through the silverware from the outside in (and millions of other rules). Our second course was a rice dish that was made with a purple lettuce that is in season this time of year. It looked unappetizing but was very delicious.
The third course was pasta shells filled with duck meat (it tasted
like tuna though). Before the fourth course, we poured our second wine which was a red cabernet franc. Very dry--I almost had to choke it down. The fourth course was the meat dish--chicken, potatoes, and artichoke. And last was the dessert--creamy vanilla gelato with fruit sauce on top. Our dessert wine was the most delicious in my opinion-a very sweet Verduzzo di Ramandolo. And to top everything off, we ended the night with a small cup of espresso. The dinner was quite an event- we arrived at the restaurant around 8:00 and were not finished until midnight.
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