Bibiana, Washington D.C.

When we go out to eat, we usually don't go for Italian, but the dearth of good restaurants in Jerusalem left me wanting for Italian food. I am also not one for Italian desserts (except for gelati and an excellent, coffee-soaked tiramisu that I had recently) but if hazelnuts are God's gift to Turkey and theobroma is the food of the gods, then the combination, Nutella, must be Italy's gift to the world. I still haven't forgiven my parents completely for having withheld their knowledge about Nutella's existence, leaving me to discover it only at the late age of 18. But boy, have I been making up for lost time! Thus, when I saw that "Nutella" was on the dessert menu at Bibiana, I thought that no amount of pasta (truffle risotto to start, black spaghetti with seafood as the main) or cured meat (a planche of salumi) could preclude dessert.

The name of the dessert reflected its components...duh. Nutella ice cream or maybe gelato which a chocolate dusted hazelnut on top. Hazelnuts have a very cute shape, as do pinenuts, but walnuts are baroque. The plate was dusted with ground hazelnut and I used the melting ice cream to hoover the hazelnut dust. The main attraction was the Nutella fried pastry filled with Nutella. As you may have gleaned from prior posts, I LOVE fried dough. (On a sidenote, Cacao on Bethesda offered tastings of fresh beignets on the day I arrived to DC. I hope heaven will have never-ending supplies of Cacao's hot chocolate and those beignets). I've had churros filled with dulce de leche and chocolate (not together), but never Nutella...until now. Brilliant! One was not enough, but one was all they gave me. One of these days, I will invest in a deep fryer, after buying a Kitchenaid stand mixer, and hire a house elf to fry fresh dough for me on command. Oh yeah, and since this post was supposed to be about the Nutella and not so much about the fried dough (I was carried away in a moment of ecstasy), the dollop of Nutella that the fried dough rested upon was a bonus. And for inquiring minds who have seen me go through jars of Nutella, I managed to restrain myself from licking the plate.