Trattoria Il Porcellino

Now that Il Lido has gone pork-free & Chiaroscuro is plain gone, here's where can we go hog-wild with Italian cuisine in the city center.

Not the typical bruschetta: one topped with pork lard & walnuts, the other with minced pork & emmental cheese. A fabulously flavorful introduction to Trattoria Il Porcellino, a pork-filled, vastly superior offshoot of Jalan P. Ramlee's pork-free Trattoria Cucina Italia.

Tomino cheese wrapped in speck bacon. Soft, oven-baked cheese with smoky, salt-cured bacon: a hookup that's sinful but sensational.

Porchetta ham, described as "the product of a pig that's gutted, deboned, arranged in layers of meat, fat & skin, then rolled, spitted & roasted over wood." Sounds tediously elaborate, but the result tastes more satisfying than supermarket ham.

Crisp-skin suckling pig ribs stuffed with cheese & ham. A bane for girth control; too fatty & greasy for our liking, but still a rather unique recipe.

Atomica Pizza, topped with spreadable pork sausage, tomato & mozzarella. A fine change from other pizzas topped with ordinary sausage slices. This has mushy, spicy sausage meat spread across its surface, providing a pleasurable pungency to every bite.

Ruffino, Aziano Chianti Classico DOCG (Toscana). All in all, there's much to recommend about Trattoria Il Porcellino, a rare Italian outlet that has a predominantly female staff, including the heads of both its kitchen & service team.

Trattoria Il Porcellino,

Menara Hap Seng, Jalan P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur.