Tuscany: Cairo Marriott's Italian Stallion

We really do love all things Italian…the pizza, the gelato, the visually stunning humans... Moving on. When we heard that Tuscany, the resident Italian eatery at The Marriott Zamalek, was relaunching, we ditched our plans for the day and headed over there to indulge ourselves in a little carbfest accompanied by a lot of wine, because it is, after all, mandatory to have wine with Italian food. Isn't it?

The place itself is all decked out to reflect a cutesy Tuscany theme, complete with huge shutter windows with an overload of flowers lining the windowsill. You can almost ignore the fact that you are in fact in the middle of smogcity Cairo and, if you imagine REALLY hard, kind of pretend you're in Italy. Except then you look around and there's no ridiculously hot people so you know you're still in Egypt. However, there is wine. So we ordered up a bottle while we perused the menu and to be honest it took us much longer than strictly necessary to decide what to order because everything looked downright delicious.

We started with Carpaccio, some fried seafood that was phenomenally fresh, and this goat cheese/aubergine/caramelised onion concoction that revolutionised our view on goat cheese. Sorry we shunned you before, goat cheese – we now know that if done right, you are sheer amazingness.

For our main dishes, it was really like Sophie's Choice; we mean, there was risotto and gnocchi (GNOCCHI!!), and ravioli, and pasta, and more pasta... In case it isn’t obvious, we like our carbs. In the end we decided, hey, we shall try our hand at being experimental eaters and will get the salmon-stuffed squid ink ravioli. Let the record show that squid ink, besides making your ravioli look like the devil's lunch in the coolest way possible, is also really good! It doesn’t have a very strong taste, but adds a minute but distinctive flavour to the dish. We now want all our food coated in inky black.

Obviously, this was not all we ordered. We are not of the 'nothing tastes as good as being skinny' camp; we're more of the 'let's stuff our faces until we can't breathe' camp. The seafood pasta was perfection, with crab meat and a creamy red sauce, the gnocchi rocked but to be fair, gnocchi is always amazing.

But dessert time, we were stuffed, and also, down three bottles of wine (FYI, this averaged out to a bottle a person but we're not alcoholics or anything like that), and a little voice inside our head said perhaps this is the opportune moment to stop eating but our stomachs were like HELL YEAH GET TIRAMISU. Which came adorably in a martini glass and was a small portion but was the epitome of creamy, coffee deliciousness. The cannoli was a little crunchy for our taste; like, in trying to cut it a piece flew across the room but we weren’t embarrassed because, well, wine. And finally, the lemon gelato was the most delicious thing we’ve tasted all month and we're currently having withdrawal symptoms.

If you're ever craving some seriously good Italian, Tuscany is the place to get it. If you can't go to the real Tuscany.

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