A couple days after the Second Helping I wrote for Parisi went up -- the one in which I reported how I'd accidentally tried to order spaghetti at a real estate office and proved, once again, what a boob I truly am -- I got a note from Christine Parisi letting me know that, while she'd certainly been happy for the friendly ink and loving comparisons to Locanda del Borgo, I'd made one tiny error.
And it wasn't just me. What I'd done was perpetuate a false bit of history that's been making the rounds for more than a decade. And now the time has come to correct it.
See, I'd said that Christine was from Boulder. "Boulder-born" was how I put it. The problem? She isn't. "I like when I read the 'Boulder-born'," she told me, "because I can trace that back to our first review ever by Bill St John in 1998. [It] seemed to stick from that point forward."
But no longer. And one of the reasons (other than the obvious need for correcting a factual error) that this got my attention? Because of where Christine was actually born.
"I am from Rochester, New York," she told me. And Rochester happens to be my own hometown and a bastion
of great East Coast Italian food.
Which, to me, goes a long way
towards explaining how Christine could recognize great Italian food
when she tasted it, and how she was able to keep the fire burning when she brought it all the way to Denver to open Parisi, along with her then-husband, whom she'd met in Italy. Granted, the time she spent in
Florence probably helped, but still...
I always like it when I find
another hometown girl who got out and made good in the Wild West.
