Been on a huge Gnocchi kick recently

[o0Ampy0o]

There used to be and may still be an authentic Italian restaurant in the South SF Bay Area which has history in the air. It has been decades since I was there but they had been at the location for a long time. It was a building reminiscent of Italy with imported decor from Italy. The waiter staff seemed to be first generation Italian. Eating there was a relished process in stages ending with coffee and tiramisu.

 

Olive Garden is Olive Garden. Round Table Pizza is Round Table pizza. Neither are Italian cuisine. There are definite differences. Sometimes I crave one or the other but I do not think of either when someone suggests going out to dinner and having Italian.

 

Olive Garden's zuppa toscana is good, the accompanying bread is dreadful.

 

I have believed "GN" is pronounced nnyaay:

Bolognese is Bul-lo-nnyaay-say

Gnocchi is nnyaw-kee

[mauriziodececco]

As far as i know, the 'GN' sound simply do not exists in english, or in french; so, you may approximate it in writing, but you can get it only from listening to an italian mother tongue.

 

Maurizio

[Mark Schmieder]

I ran into similar obstacles when I visited Portugal last year. I had been told they all know Spanish anyway (not even remotely true!) and that the languages aren't that different (also not true; at least from a pronunciation and spelling point of view).

 

I had to learn Italian a couple of decades ago when I worked at an Italian company that did all of its software documentation and company communications in Italian. I found it easy to pick up, but people weren't terribly picky about accuracy as they were all from different regions of Italy anyway.

 

We never went out for gnocchi though -- they didn't approve of the Italian restaurants in the Santa Clara CA area (nor did I). There's a good one in the Northern Central Valley between Sacramento and Redding but it's been almost twenty years so I don't recall; maybe in Willows or nearby?