Sign up to get Matt Kettmann’s Full Belly Files, which serves up multiple courses of food & drink coverage every Friday, going off-menu from our regularly published content to deliver tasty nuggets of restaurant, recipe, and refreshment wisdom to your inbox
I’d long admired the notion of people rising to the lifestyle status of bon vivant or gourmand, though I’m not sure I’d really met a proper version of either until Antonio Gardella came into my life about 20 years ago.
Specifically, he wandered into the Independent’s office on West Figueroa Street one afternoon to attend the casual wine tastings that I used to host, a means of educationally disposing of the free samples I received back then. He’d been invited by our mutual friend Leslie Thomas, who was then working (mostly for fun) at Jaffurs Winery and hosting a series of wine dinners around town…