Finding Little Italy In Bangkok (PHOTOS)

During a recent stay in Bangkok, around week five of my travels, I felt summoned elsewhere. I needed some good, traditional Italian food.
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I often find myself wanting to go back to Italy, a country with which my kinship is twofold. First, filial: My great grandparents emigrated from Lucca to San Francisco in 1906, arriving the evening before the famous earthquake crumbled their apartment building to the ground. They stuck around. (I'm convinced there's something in my genetics that allows me to be so deeply comforted by gnocchi or caprese.) Second is what I think of as a palatal connection. For me, good Italian food is transportive, it's how I return to the narrow alleys of Rome or the emerald hills of Tuscany when life won't allow me to pick up and go there.

For the past seven weeks I've been eating my way through through Southeast Asia -- kaeng lueang in Phuket, khanom chin nam ngiao in Chiang Mai and pad thai everywhere -- ignoring the inevitable US traveler's pang for western comfort food, to the best of my ability. But during a recent stay in Bangkok, around week five of my travels, I felt summoned elsewhere. Call it a moment of weakness, or a travelers' fit to escape the current local, no matter how close to paradise it may be, but I just needed good, traditional Italian food.

So I found myself on the ground floor of the new St. Regis at their Italian restaurant, Jojos, to which I owe an evening transported. First stop: Piedmonte, the region of my ancestry, for proscuitto-thin slices of Scottona beef cured in matcha green tea and organic honey. Then onto a dense white cloud of buratta floating on a plate of the same color, brightened by the peppery bite of arugula. Cheese, an inherent weakness of mine, is not easy to find in Asia, so I knew I was in trouble when I saw Jojos "cheese vault," housing over 20 types of imported artisan cheese from Italy.

Apparently Fabrizio (the executive chef, from Sicily) must've seen my eyes widen at this formaggio treasure trove, because a few minutes later he jaunted back to my table, toting a cart with a Castelmagno cheese wheel the size of a Vespa tire. Chuckling, he tossed three heaps of fettuccine into the center of the wheel and tossed it till thickly coated, making the actual pasta serve more as a vehicle for the cheese than as the centerpiece of the dish. (I was totally fine with that.) To top it off he peppered it with black truffle shavings.

The end of the meal stayed true to the beginning, with a simple but rich and quality finish: A thick slice of Gianduiotto Gobino hazelnut chocolate carved right off the five kilogram block, table-side. By the end of the meal I truly felt like I was back in Firenze -- full, happy, and too full to go far. Luckily the rest of the St. Regis is as enticing at Jojos, so I slowly made my way up to a room on the 18th floor (I made a pit stop at the 15th floor bar for a Siam Bloody Mary, served in a stein with a garnish of lemongrass and mint), then drifted into a blissful food-coma sleep.

When I awoke the sun was rising over the downtown skyline, and I was happy to be back in Bangkok to continue my journey through Asia.

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