[June 2025] On this day, we made a reservation at a restaurant called Ma Lo’ in the town of Carpi in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.
As usual, my husband found this restaurant online.
Located in the new town of Carpi, it’s on the ground floor of a building with what appear to be apartments above.
The surrounding area had absolutely no charm.
The restaurant itself is modern, but not overly pretentious, and the waiter was very friendly.
For starter, we had a platter of ham and salami, a local specialty, and gnocco fritto.
We also had tigelle, a round flatbread, and crescenza, a soft, chewy cheese.
This was my first time trying tigelle bread.
It looks like a flattened imagawayaki (a typical Japanese sweet), and apparently it is a traditional bread from Modena.
Modena is a town about 30 minutes south from here by car, so you could say it’s local.
It was a new thing for me to eat this bread with Crescenza cheese spread on it.
The cold cuts were good but not that surprising, though.
I had duck for my main course.
I’m not sure what it was, but the fruity red sauce really brought out the flavour of the ingredients and was delicious.
My husband chose homemade macaroni topped with a sauce made from slowly simmered pork cheeks.
The sauce was generous, and the homemade macaroni was heavy, but satisfying and tasty, he said.
By this point, we were both completely full, so we skipped dessert.
We ordered a bottle of Sangiovese wine, but perhaps because it was so hot, we couldn’t finish it.
The leftovers were available for takeout, so we took them back to the hotel and put them in the fridge.
We learned in Sicily that even red wine should be chilled when it’s hot, and we’ve been doing that ever since.
Europe experienced unusually hot weather this past June, and perhaps this day marked the beginning of that.
We were sitting at a table by the window in the restaurant, and it felt nice when a gentle breeze came in, but it was already perfect weather for air conditioning.
