Lo Scrigno del Duomo (upstairs)

The day: 3^rd November 2008, Dinner.
The place: Piazza del Duomo, Trento
The venue: Scrigno del Duomo Osteria and Wine Bar
The food: Simple Fine Italian
The drinks: Short but strong list, Italian based, with several lesser known varieties

We are temporarily in Trento and we are thinking of paying our beloved Franca Merz a visit …but it’s a Monday! I Due Camini, like many other places, is closed. So why not stay in the very centre of town, and try the less formal sister venue of the Michelin starred Scrigno del Duomo? While the formal restaurant is in a basement, this is at ground level. The interior is warm and appealing – it reminds us a bit of the Vinothek in Bad Mergentheim (which also had an associated starred venue).

The menu is short and offers simple but very enticing dishes. First of all, you can just have a selection of Salumi (cured meats) and Cheeses (€8.50 for 5 items and €10.50 for 7). The Cheese section especially would offer you a comprehensive sample of the best of the Trentino production, including of course the fabulous Puzzone di Moena. There is a €33 three course menu. And then there are various individual dishes or salads, such as Spinach ‘sformatino’ with Puzzone cheese and Finferli (i.e. girolles) mushrooms at €9 or Octopus carpaccio with vegetables, oil and lemon at €12.

In the meanwhile, the bread arrives:

A nicely presented ‘basket’, with a small selection of superior bread.

The bread is made out of stone-ground high quality flour and leaven. The result speaks for itself.

For first courses we go for:

- Homemade tagliatelle with roasted duck (€10)

- Val di Gresta potato cream with veal meatballs and braised savoy cabbage (€10)

Well well well these are very nicely presented dishes for an osteria! The potato cream is just slightly gluey, but the potato flavour is striking indeed. The meatballs are larger than we thought and just perfect, moist and fulfilling, obviously made with good raw material. And the olive oil is top notch which, as ever, elevates the dish.

The tagliatelle are good if a bit ‘nervous’. But what amazing taste, here we are at fine dining, not osteria, levels: the reduction is intense and velvety; the aromatic tang of the rosemary tends to dominate but it integrates splendidly with the reduction and with the excellent duck. A pasta dish among the best we’ve had of late.

And the secondi:

- Roman ‘puntarelle’ with tuna morsels and balsamic vinaigrette (€15)

- Warm beef salad with vegetables and Tropea onions (€11).

The puntarellle, a typical vegetable from the Lazio region (of course also in London we sometimes find wonderful version of them here), are pleasantly fresh and crunchy, while the tuna, although slightly overcooked is still tender. The acidic base is apt, with the flaked almonds adding a gentler, sweeter finish.

The beef is boiled, shredded and composed with the finely sliced onions, fennels and small carrots. A moist, light and succulent dish, in which once again the acidic hint adds to the sense of freshness. Very agreeable on the palate.

All in all, with some water and two glasses of wine, the total came to around €60. Good value given the quality.

The service was friendly and correct. We are very happy. We are happy because with all the things that are going wrong in Italy it’s nice at least to come across places who uphold the standards of our cuisine in this way. It does not seem to take much to prepare a simple rewarding Italian dish: excellent, possibly local, ingredients, correct cooking, don’t go too heavy with the fats, and a sprinkle of personal touch – you don’t need to master complex preparations as in French cuisine. Yet so few manage to get it right. They certainly do it at this Osteria. We find it much better value than the starred sister venue downstairs where, despite the presence of a good chef, the experience can be a little hit and miss (the place where to go for fine cuisine in Trento is here). None of it here, where everything, but really everything, was most pleasant and well priced. Try it.

Cala Caterina

The day: 3 September 2008, Dinner.
The place: Via Lago Maggiore 32, Villasimius, Cagliari
The venue: Cala Caterina Hotel

Closest airport: Cagliari (British Airways, Easy Jet)
The food: Fine Regional Italian Dining
The drinks: List strong on regional wines, but far more expensive than the local average, and vintages not indicated on the list of national wines.

What a start. The first dinner of our 2008 Sardinian holiday –let us not make you wait with bated breath- was a letdown. This restaurant is part of a luxury hotel (which looks actually quite nice) situated in the breathtaking Southeastern Sardinian coast. The room is spacious, in light white/yellow colours, a mixture of rustic (floor) and formal (upholstered chairs) environment, with very wide tables.

There is a fixed ‘tasting’ menu (five courses) that costs €50 which, as we shall see, is much more than you need to pay locally for excellent food. And thinking of it, it is even more than what you need to pay in London.

The waitress comes to our table and asks what changes to the menu we want. She looks amazed when we say we don’t want any change. But yes, we want it just as the chef has designed it.

The bread arrives:

Decent, but the really bad omen is the unrequested and dreaded giant peppermill, with a giant salt mill in addition:

And here is the antipasto:

Terrina of ricotta with walnut olive oil, courgettes in ‘escabece’ (marinated) and swordfish carpaccio.

This turned out to be the best dish of the evening, so pay attention…The Carpaccio is cut thickly, a bit of a hatchet job but let’s say it’s a rustic style and we can appreciate it that way. The main problem is the excess acidity from the lemon. The ricotta is good with excellent walnut flavoured olive oil on top, but neither we nor the waitress could identify the accompanying sauce. And the courgettes, though looking horrible, were in fact really good, overall softly textured but with some crispiness left, and expressing a concentrated and balanced sweet/acidic flavour.

Next:

Pasta with vegetables and basil, and potato gnocchi with red mullet sauce and saffron.

The pasta looks horrible and it was in fact scandalous. It had clearly been reheated (the waitress refused to confirm or deny…), with mediocre vegetables artlessly assembled and especially a cringing, chewy aubergine, all skin. Far better to focus on the gnocchi, with the ragout sauce just slightly salty, but satisfactory, not too fat (contrast with Refettorio) and yielding a pleasant mullet flavour. It was very strange, anyway, to have these two dishes in a single plate.

Then we have a:

Tomato cream soup

As you can see, it is served smudged (not that anybody seems to care in this place), but otherwise it is an OK soup, pleasantly acidic, very light (no excess cream as we feared), and leaving a good flavour on your palate.

Here come the mains:

Beef with cannonau and shallot reduction, Monkfish with candies tomato and olive oil.

The fish has a defrosted consistency, which is unbelievable and a real shame in an area where (more on this story later) it is so easy to eat fantastic fish. Bad. The beef was better, though the reduction was lacking the promised intensity and did not look very professional, and the cheese, what was the point of the cheese. Another strange combination in a single plate.

We are asked if we want desserts now. We say yeas and five seconds later they appear, making us feel really rushed.

Crepes with chocolate and strawberry pudding, passion fruit sauce and red wine reduction

The strawberry mousse is acceptable flavour wise and texture wise, and the ‘crepe’ (crespella) was positively good. The whipped cream looked unnecessary in this dish (both the crepe filling and the mousse were creamy already). You could have played cricket with the chocolate muffin.

Overall, with a bottle of Ruinas Colli del Limbara Depperu IGT 2007 (but advertised as a DOC 2006) at a steep €33 (very inflated by local standards) and water at €4 (inflated by local standards), the bill comes to €137. We leave no tip.

What to say of this place? It is overall mediocre and far overpriced everyday hotel food, and should be left to the hotel guests, who at least don’t pay the outrageous prices (given the quality) that external guests have to fork out. It’s ridiculous to try and attract customers from outside pretending they have the kitchen to provide dishes worth a trip on purpose. They just don’t. How they got on the ViaMichelin with a positive recommendation is a profound mystery to us. We repeat: this is NOT a restaurant; it’s just a hotel which provides food. The moment you arrive, the waiters, who could not care less for what is in your dish even if they ask, can’t wait to have you out of there. We arrived almost at 9.00, and we left before 10.00! By the end, we were almost the only customers left, and breakfast service for the next day was being prepared in front of us, while we were finishing the meal:

At least we snatched a few breakfast cereals on our way out…

We drove back to our apartment in a disappointed and perplexed mood, but thinking of the crystal clear sea and white sandy beaches waiting for us on the following day. Avoid this ‘restaurant’, as for the same money you can have fantastic meals nearby, and think twice the next time you consult ViaMichelin.

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