Trattoria La Siciliana

This morning Christa and I dropped Caleb at school and then popped over to Starbucks for coffee and muffins. Gotta enjoy these 'date' moments when we can. Even baby Regan is with us in her carseat on the ground.

A guy drinking coffee and reading the paper in one of the chairs notices her and asks how old she is. It turns out that his wife is six months pregnant with their first daughter. Not only that, but he is the head chef and part-owner (with his siblings) of an Italian restaurant in Berkeley called Trattoria La Siciliana.

He described it as southern Italian as opposed to northern Italian that you find in most Italian restaurants. The main difference is that southern Italians were traditionally poorer than the ones from the north. They had to make do with what they had for food. For example, sometimes they use toasted bread crumbs on top of past rather than parmesan cheese. Other 'peasant' food that he mentioned were such things as stuffed sardines. There's no way Christa would ever go in for that, but I'd sure like to try it. I think we're going to try it out sometime in the next few weeks.