As this holiday has been officially designated an eating and drinking holiday, I must fill in details of the activities involved.
Gargnano
Meals at
Baia d’Oro in
Gargnano are made special by the gorgeous bay that nearly always upstages the food and wine. The light here has a luminosity that picks out every color and shape and sears the resulting images into your brain. What chance does grilled
corregone have? Or the chilled glass of
prosecco that starts every meal?
Dinner at
La Tortuga, Gargnano's acknowledged bastion of fine dining in over 30 years, does not suffer from this distraction. Located on the main road (it
is the main road even if it spreads out to only a car-width) and cut off from the lakeview, the restaurant is serenely decorated with genteel bric-a-brac and fresh flowers. The use of edgy, arty light fittings rescues the room from being unrelievedly introverted and spinsterly.
Dinner was well executed and highly commendable, just as you would expect dinner at the table of your worldly Aunt Agatona to be. There were no surprises though.
Gubbio
At the
Buon Ricordo in
Gubbio, the
Degustazione al Tartufo was a veritable orgy of truffles. It started with
carpaccio, bruschetta, brustengo, all
al tartufo; then a procession of truffled everything: eggs, ravioli, and beef fillet with a potato pudding. Even Stuart felt a trifle overwhelmed.
I had poached eggs, truffled and accompanied by a thin julienne of vegetables.
Perugia
At the deeply atmospheric
L’Opera in
Perugia, we were presented with an English menu. Oops, there it is again. That brief stab of fear. Fear that we had stumbled into yet another tourist trap. We needn’t have worried though. The food was good.
An interesting thing about the menu: at the back is a detailed note regarding the salts, rice, oils, and vinegars used.
English Maldon sea salt, Himalaya pink salt, and American rock salt. Rice is organically cultivated then aged for a year. Oils are Umbrian, Ligurian, Tuscan, Sicilian, and Venetian. Vinegars are Barolo, fig, champagne, sherry, and traditional aromatic of Modena.
Wait till you hear about the food!
There was a rabbit terrine sauced with a vinegar reduction; the promised dentex dredged in maize, thyme, and barley; and the “dreaded” (sic) sea-bass with parsley and cuttlefish ink soup. I would have liked to try the aubergine crêpes with buffalo mozzarella but they had run out, this being their last workday before their holiday.
I didn’t mind; I enjoyed everything I had. It was all good.
Bologna
In Bologna, we stayed at another Baglioni hotel. The Grand Hotel Baglioni though is the real deal: it looks and feels like a grand hotel. Pina at reception is delightfully chatty, cheerful, knowledgeable and always ready to help; surely a model hotel employee if ever there was one.
The breakfast room is pure delight. The courtyard roof accordions open to bring in the sunlight. All four walls are frescoed in cheerful
tromp l’oeil.
Dinner at the hotel restaurant,
I Carracci, was a somber affair. Beneath the noble vaults of the frescoed ceiling, only three tables were occupied: there was Stuart and me, there was a family of cheerful self-absorbed English tourists, and there was the hotel GM. He nodded to us, we nodded back.
The menu gave a recipe for fruit Bavarian cream with red fruit sauce.