Trento December Pilgrimage number 2

Second installment of our Trento Pilgrimage series, before the grand finale...

Right on the main square across the cathedral, we continue our pilgirmage by ignoring the cathedral, and turning our attention instead, for a light meal, to one of the best value sanctuaries for the gastronome, the 'upper' informal section of the starred and deeply buried Lo Scrigno.

One is tempted by various types of cheeses and 'salumi', but we opt for some more proper dishes.

Puntarelle with seared tuna for example:

fresh and delicious.

And in this salmon strudel


there is true inspiration. An admirable little dish, with that cabbage inside the croute offering perfect moisture and concentrating the flavour.

We absolutely adore horses:

Well, what can we do: we loved it!

This an operation of great intelligence, with fresh, simple and precise cuisine at good prices (remembering you are at a starred establishment in a most central location), in a pleasant, relaxed environment. Last but not least, oh no, not least, the by-the-glass wine list is stonking value, too.

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Trento December Pillgrimage n.1

This is the first of three sketches on our autumnal Trento pilgrimage...which commenced with our beloved Menestrinas, at Osteria Fior di Roccia.

We had the amazing Gran Bollito misto

in which even the humble potato becomes a rich treat, imbibed as it is with all that meaty delight.
Accompanied by the 5 prodigious sauces...

and this time also by pickled cherries

of wonderfully tart intensity.

But we could not let the chestnut menu go...

Chestnut gnocchi with walnuts and sultanas:


where the yummy materials are bound together so smoothly.

The Chestnut stuffed Hen:


Delicious, look at that golden meat.

Menestrina has the soul of a master patissier...

With the Bollito misto menu came

Bread and apple pudding with Schiava reduction:


And with the chestnut menu,

Chocolate and chestnut 'cupoletta', sharon fruit coulis

Chesnut and sharon fuit, that eternal autumnal combination, found on all tables from trattoria to multistarred (remember Hibiscus for example?)....but not everybody has a knack for it, nor the right raw material. At 2* Hibiscus, for example, the sharon fruit (and we must say, the whole dessert) was vastly inferior to the one we had here (at a small fraction of the price).

And have a look at the chestnut cremy triumph inside the gracious crunchy cupoletta, please :


As ever, in this simple and friendly trattoria, one finds materials of stunning quality cooked with passion and integrity, and, incredibly, with the precision and imagination of high cuisine. Menestrina modestly says: 'I'm not after masterpieces, I only do things as they should be done'. And he does!

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Castel Pergine

The day: 23 April 2009, Dinner.

The place: Via al Castello 10, I-38057 Pergine Valsugana (Trento)

The venue: Ristorante Castel Pergine

The food: pretentious regional

Airport: Verona, Brescia (BA, Ryanair)

The drinks: Mostly local.

Castel Pergine sits on a hill overlooking the Valsugana – the views are simply stunning, with the Brenta dolomites eying you from afar.

But, alas, this view, which we could also enjoy from our table, and the physical environment within the restaurant, will be the only good thing about our visit…

The restaurant itself is housed inside the beautiful castle, and it will take you some time to guess the right door – but eventually you will find yourself in a bar, leading to the main dining room. The interior is elegant but not stuffy, it’s nicely understated and soberly grand, with a wooden ceiling and white ‘rough’ walls. Just a pity that even on a mild Spring evening it was on the coldish side.

The tables are comfortable but absurdly long, so that Man and Woman look at each other from a great distance…

The menu is short but interesting: besides three different set menus of four courses each (on our visit these were the “Menu of the day and the season”, the “Menu trentino” and the “Spring Menu”, all priced at €34, or €45 if including accompanying wines) one can choose among dishes of the day (including e.g. a 70s relic, fresh pasta with lemon, cream and brandy sauce at €9), or the much more interesting barley and cicerchie soup with hop bread crouton at a mere €5 – the cicerchia is an old legume very similar to chickpea.

We opt for the Spring menu.

The bread, in the meanwhile, arrives, giving no forewarning of what the meal will be like…

Not bad, and good variety: white sesame, mixed sesame, sunflower, pumpkin…and served with two good butters, flavoured with cerfoglio (chervil) and aglio orsino (wild garlic), respectively. Interesting ideas. A pity that there is no plate for the bread.

And here’s the starter:

- Poached organic egg from Val dei Mocheni on ‘flowery green’ with local dandelion (tarassaco) and lardons with apple balsamic vinegar

When courses have such complicated names it is often a bad omen…This dish was disconcerting, so salty it was almost inedible. Some lardons were indeed so hard as to be positively inedible. The greens are difficult to eat (they are curly and firm, so that it is impossible to get them in your mouth without a curl fighting to enter your nostrils!) and very bitter. Once the watery egg is broken, the lot truly is an unsavoury mess.

Let’s hope for the better with the first course:

- Orzotto (=barley-otto) mantecato with bruscandoli (=hop shoots), cream of parsley roots and crayfish.

We propose an alternative name for this dish: orzotto drowned in excessive liquid, well overcooked and unpleasantly cheesy, with rubbery crayfish. We also note that one dish contained seven crayfish, the other four (same dimension). Now, if this is not a sign of complete carelessness in the kitchen…

What surprise will the main spring for us?

- Suckling pig leg stuffed with with wild asparagus, on a bed of smoked potatoes, the first shoots of the season and crispy pancetta.

In the context, this is not a bad dish, just a sad dish. This was suckling pig, its meat should have been tender, of the melt-in-your-mouth variety. Pity: not tasting of anything (just look at that watery gravy), the dry and toughish meat at least leaves no bad flavour in the mouth. Except for the pancetta slice which is pure concentrated salt.

We look forward to the end:

- Orange bavaroise in citrus fruit zuppetta with Bronte pistachio ‘croccante’

A rather weird, disconnected dessert, with a very acidic zuppetta on one side and a creamy bavaroise which, though decent, does not taste at all of what it should taste. But the stunning thing is that the advertised pistachio croccante is not there, replaced by pistachio crumbs and an amaretto biscuit in the glass. When we point this out to the waiter, first he tries to convince us that the pistachio croccante was not in our menu. Presented with the crime evidence, he politely apologises and we implore him not to bring any croccante, because we are more than satisfied with what we had… we are itching to get out.

With a bottle of Pinot Nero Pojer e Sandri 2006 (€23), the best part of the meal, and water at €3, the total comes to €94. Not much but far too much when you think you can have accomplished cuisine at €70 (including drinks) on the other side of the Adige valley.

The service is polite, friendly and incompetent (no knowledge of any dish). Not much to say on the food, really: visit Castel Pergine, by all means, a real treasure with wonderful exhibitions and the breathtaking views. But steer as clear as you can from its restaurant. We want to believe that the main chef was not in the kitchen at the time we visited, because we do not think any self-respecting professional would let that sort of food go through the pass. But we wonder how much his presence alone can overturn the desperate situation. A pity, as this could be an absolutely unbeatable venue.

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Da Pino

The day: 8^th April 2009, Dinner.

The place: Via Postal 39, Grumo, San Michele all’ Adige, Trento (IT) (0461 650 435)

The venue: Ristorante Da Pino

The food: Regional and fish

Airport: Verona, Brescia (BA, Ryanair)

The drinks: Mostly from Trentino-Alto Adige, very wide selection (in the high hundrdes of labels)

We thought by now we knew all the interesting choices within 10 miles of Trento. Well, life is full of surprises: how presumptuous of us! Driving along the Adige valley, in Teroldego wine country, this spacious restaurant appears in the tiny village of Grumo, with claims to honest, wholesome cuisine and boasting appealing prices.

The interior is spacious, welcoming, light, neat if a bit eccentric, with a gentle touch of formality that one might not expect. We learn later that the restaurant caters for large parties and functions. Anyway, on the night, luckily for us there are only a dozen customer beside us.

On the menu, many local, trattoria style dishes, but what catches our attention is a copious presence of seafood offerings. We call the waiter and try to glean some information (we are in the middle of mountains and to eat good seafood one really must go to the right places: Man’s disgusted grimace at Woman’s proposal to go for fish says it all…). The waiter is convincing. Woman eggs on. And we are encouraged by the information that all seafood here is supplied by a well-known fishmonger nearby, a fishmonger that serves some of the best restaurants in Trento. We go for it. (Next time we might try the Trentino tasting menu at €32, with enticing items such as Local apple risotto with cinnamon or Seared venison loin with pan-fried apples, juniper and Polenta di Storo).

The bread arrives:

Not a bad offering, indeed the variety is very surprising: walnut bread ‘taralli’, standard white, grissini, rye. The usual thought strikes us: a restaurant that shows such care for the bread basket must show a similar care for food.

Both our primi are seafood:

- Thyme tonnarelli with Scampi (aka Dublin bay prawns) tails and asparagus (€10)

- ‘Fazzoletto’ al nero (squid-ink) with seabass filling and langoustine sauce (€10)

The fazzoletto (a large pasta slice, lasagna style, but folded) looks impressive, its elegant black dress provocatively offering a glimpse of the filling. It’s a balanced explosion of Mediterranean flavours, the fish fresh, tasty, light, and generous. The pasta is very good: the restaurant buys it in from a trusted supplier, who formerly worked on the premises. Always suspicious of bought in materials, for this reason alone we had not wanted to try this dish (Woman’s disgusted grimace at Man’s proposal to go for it says it all…), but when we expressed our perplexity to the waiter he vouched so energetically for the quality of the pasta, egged on by Man, that we capitulated. And once again he was convincing…

The tonnarelli are sligthly salty. But the fish once again cannot be faulted for freshness and flavour, nor its quantity for lack of generosity. The asparagus comes in both white and green variety, a nice touch, and the always present tomatoes add moisture. All is bound by very good quality olive oil, leaving an impression of richness and lightness at the same time.

For mains, we both go for the same choice:

- Roasted seabass (€15)

For the joy of the waiter we insisted on boning the large portions of fish ourselves (which –we noticed- wasn’t the case at the other tables: what is the world coming to?).

It does not take that long to produce this:

When eating fresh fish, the process, slowing you down, actually increases your pleasure and satisfaction, don’t you agree? And this was truly fresh, full of flavour. What more to say? Well, maybe that it was a little overcooked, though mercifully just so and definitely not to the point of spoiling the experience. The roast tomatoes with capers, herbs and olives, in true ‘southern’ style (at the foot of the Alps!), were a delicious accompaniment (but very rich!).

We are in the mood for dessert.

- Raspberry cake (‘tortino’) (€5)

- Sweet fantasia (€6.50)

The tortino is correctly made and carries an intense, authentic raspberry whiff, but is slightly dry, so the accompanying custard, quite OK, is very welcome.

The fantasia presents us with a strawberry parfait (a little ‘brittle’), a ‘crostata’ (slightly dry), panettone-like (OK), blueberry buckwheat cake (excellent, intense, and strudel (OK, but made with puff pastry and therefore neither truly traditional nor fully successful).

With a bottle of Chardonnay LongarivaPraistel 2000 at €28 and 1 litre of H2O at €2.50 the total damage comes to €95,30. This is extremely reasonable for a seafood dinner of such quality and quantity.

What a nice little place (well, actually not so little) this one. The service is friendly with varying levels of professionalism (one knowledgeable and very passionate waiter, another less interested in the dishes he was selling us), but always attentive. As for the cuisine, it expresses a rewarding feeling of generosity, of care, both in the choice of materials and in the process of cooking itself. Despite the formality this is essentially a (superior) trattoria: you will not find highly sophisticated creations here, but plainly good food, with some touches of originality with respect to the classics, some attention to presentation, and some assuredness of touch. So, congratulations to the head chef Beppe Principe and to the family who runs this operation with such honesty and integrity (it reminds us a bit of Da Barbara in Sardinia). We will probably be back, and we invite you to try it, too!

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Mas de la Fam

The day: 2^nd February 2009, Dinner.

The place: Via Stella 18 Ravina (Trento) (tel: 0461 349114)

The venue: Mas de La Fam

The food: (Multi)Regional Italian

The drinks: good Italian wines and interesting house wine.

Last time, while describing one of our divine meals at Locanda Margon, we promised to compare and contrast their delicacy and elegance with something less classy. As we will show you in a future post (stay tuned…) we have nothing against simple, rustic, basic, traditional, hearty food. What we cannot stand is heavy-handed, sloppy and pretentious cuisine. This is exactly what you find at a recent opening just a few dozens meters on the hill where… Locanda Margon sits.

Mas de La Fam is a converted farmhouse. The conversion has been done well, integrating intelligently a modern, ‘young’ style in the old rustic structure. A not insignificant amount of money and architectural talent appears to have been used in the enterprise.

We chose the tasting menu at €33 (three courses, excluding desert which is paid on top if you choose to have it).

The bread arrives

Not memorable but OK.

- Carpaccio di carne salada con cappuccio rosso, tortino al radicchio con salsa ai formaggi, verdure del Mas.

The carne salada is a type of regional cured (salted) beef with red cabbage, which can be served grilled or raw. Here it is raw, and it is a good specimen, well matched with the cabbage. The verdure del Mas feature some pickled vegetables of which the artichoke verges on inedible because of lack of proper cooking and preparation: it is hard, woody, horrible. The pepper and the radicchio aren’t bad, but overall this section of the dish is an explosion of oiliness and acidity. The tortino has a texturally unpleasant and rough brise’ base, but the flavour, beside the heavy hand with cheese, is agreeable - well, just so, for Woman, who still cannot get over that artichoke, while Man tries to put a smiling face over this underwhelming beginning. Overall the assemblage in this dish does not make much sense to us.

- Strangolapreti al gorgonzola and tortelloni speck e noci

The strangolapreti (traditional flour, bread, egg and spinach pasta) are a little hard but an energetic friend to your tastebuds (provided you like gorgonzola), and the tortelloni assault your palate with heavy but once again benign flavours. This is on the unrefined side of good, so what is the cheffy decoration separating the two sides doing there?

- Tagliata del Mas al rosmarino, formaggio (cheese) di malga alla griglia, with Contorni (carrots, potatoes)

The tagliata is memorably unremarkable. So we are pinning our hopes on the malga cheese. These cheeses from milk of cows which graze at altitude come often from tiny producers, so that they offer an enormous variety, each one different from the other. When they are good, they really regale you with complex and subtle aromas. Alas, this poor one has been treated so harshly on the grill that it might have been the most undistinguished of industrial cheeses.

The potatoes are amazingly greasy and heavy, and we are forced to leave them. Yes, you’ve read it right, we left something on the plate. If you have read other of our reviews, you’ll know that we can count on the fingers of half a hand the number of times we leave food on the plate. Mummy taught us so. But even imprinting has a limit ;-).

Talking of limits, we skip dessert. We’ve had enough.

A full meal here, with a bottle of wine around €20 and a bottle of water will cost you near €100. While this may seem OK by London standards, it is a lot for trattoria food in Trentino (see e.g. here and here).

The service somehow attempts to be polite but it does not have a clue, it really doesn’t. An example. When we ask about the varieties in the wine SHE is recommending us, the waitress says she does not know. With a flash of inspiration she then looks at the label, but alas, she says that the label does not help. Well, it is probably Cabernet, or Merlot. Not Pinot Noir. We look at the label and we notice with interest that it lists exactly the grapes that make up this wine.

The result of the chef’s efforts is very mediocre indeed from the culinary point of view. This is merely ordinary, with touches of unacceptable (gosh, that artichoke), and very heavy handed cuisine with a tendency to destroy flavours, but which clearly believes to be of higher standards. It is extortionate by local standards in terms of value for money. Walk up the hill, take out €50 extra euros to dine at Locanda Margon, and you’ll feel you have saved money. The final straw for us for was to see a cook with the cigarette hanging from his lip while assembling a dish. This says it all, we thought.

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Bollito Misto at Osteria Fior di Roccia

‘Bollito misto’ (let’s say ‘Mixed boiled meats’) is one of the great classics of Italian popular cuisine: an assortment of ‘plebeian’ cuts of meat and poultry cooked in broth. We enjoyed an interpretation by Michele Menestrina at this great little joint overlooking the dreamy Valle dei Laghi (Lake Valley) which eventually leads from Trento to Lake Garda.

To stimulate our appetite (really no need, since we need to recuperate the usual 1000 metre ascent in the snow - with ‘ciaspole’, also known as snow rackets - of the previous day), a little present from the kitchen, a trattoria amuse bouche:

It’s a ricotta quenelle with radicchio and walnuts, on a slice of toasted pan brioche. Delicious, the delicate sweet, bitter and acidic flavours from the components, and the textures, just perfect to set our taste-buds on full alert.

The bread arrives:

Always home-made, always very good, this time also with some radicchio rolls, a first for us here.

And now, ladies and gentleman, we begin:

- Gran bollito misto.

An array of sauces is brought to the table. From left to right we have radish, fig mustard, ‘peverada’ (a traditional sauce from the region: breadcrumbs from bread toasted in the pan, bone marrow long cooked in stock, some stock itself), then a classic ‘salsa verde’ (green sauce, parsley based), and finally a tomato sauce. Even without waiting for the meat we unceremoniously begin to pick and try…Then…

A warm dish is brought to you with a potato and a stewed finely sliced onion. Taste-buds on even fuller alert.

Then the copper container…

…from which you yourself will pick the pieces to put in the plate. It’s nice once in a while to eat stuff in the order that you bloody prefer, each piece with the sauce you bloody want, with nobody hovering to tell you how you must eat.

Let’s open it:

We have a chicken leg, two tongues cooked in two ways, (‘salmistrata’, kind of corned veal tongue salt cured; and 'normal'), both veal and beef muscle, and ‘cotechino’ (home-made of course, no industrial shit here). The ox-tail which is normally there is missing today, and has been replaced by the second tongue. Now, let’s just shut up and eat, this is fabulous!

In the end, we certainly do have the space for the dessert of this set menu

- Budino di pane e mela Golden con caramello di Schiava Nera (Steamed bread and apple pudding with Schiava Nera (a local wine) caramel).

Excellent, this choice of a dessert characterised by local ingredients and rooted in tradition, in keeping with the rest of the menu. But Menestrina is a missed chef patissiere, his desserts always so intense and balanced, and this dessert is truly on a different plane. Just look at the presentation.

All was accompanied by a local wine, a Rebo at €17 (more on the Rebo wine at some point) and water, a full litre bottle of it, that extinct animal, at €2.50. The whole menu (all you’ve seen above) cost…€23. Yes. Including proper tablecloths, amuse bouche, bread, smiling service and ambience. This must be the best quality for money on earth (we think of St. John’s in London, of all the rave around it, and the star, and the prices, and we somehow feel that the world is crazy).

We love, love meat. And so this was for us a fabulous treat, a vigorous interpretation of popular heartiness, but with refinement of presentation, a kaleidoscope of flavours and attention to cooking and the choice of cuts and materials (true, this last feat facilitated by a dad in the butcher’s trade who gives a willing hand!) that reveal the true chef behind the stoves. For this year, we think bollito is gone: Spring is upon us (even if here in Trentino we were under snow yesterday). What will Chef Michele be putting on the new season menu? Be sure we will find out…

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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.