Just a 40-minute drive northwest of Bologna, I get lost. Pianura PadanaAn endless plain of farms, vineyards and orchards in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. This area is as picturesque as Wyeth, or for that matter. berterianoa vibrant landscape extracted directly from the paintings of the fin-de-siècle Emiliani painters Luigi and Flavio Bertelli.
Welcome to Bottura World. Chef Massimo His Bottura and his wife Lara Gilmour are his B&B with an emphasis on cooking, Casa His Maria, a microstate of hospitality centered around his Luisia.
Al Gatto Verde, located in Modena, Italy, is Massimo Bottura’s newest restaurant.
From the first time I visited in 2019, I fell in love with it. It’s a luxuriously restored 18th century villa, with a family kitchen stocked with delicious and healthy treats, and stunning modern art on every wall, put together by the wonderful Francescana family (Bottura’s global team) , and it wasn’t just the chilled Lambrusco in my bedroom. It was a perfect overlap of food, art, hospitality, sustainability and nature in a way that captured the region of Emilia-Romagna and showed its best features. (This is Italy’s breadbasket, Aceto di balsamic Prosciutto, Max Mara, Maserati, Tortellini, etc.).
Although its rural address may not be well-known, Casa Maria Luigia has been a rising star in the culinary world since its opening. Its breakfast buffet is advertised as “the best breakfast in the world”. cotechino (slow-roasted pork sausage on top of crumbled almond cookies and covered with a generous amount of zabaglione) is amazing. Maria Her Luigi’s Francescana Evening Her Dinner Her program is Osteria Her Francescana’s menu featuring retired hits.
This year’s pilgrimage to the magical Bottura World includes the introduction of the property’s new restaurant, Al Gatto Verde.
Al Gatto Verde is a casually chic trattoria set in an old barn in the Modena countryside, next to Casa Maria Luigia. The story of its birth is a combination of fate and chance, much like Jack Pearson’s multimedia work on the green wall.
Bottura explained that Casa Maria Luigia hosted Tòla Dòlza, a weekend barbecue brunch in the villa’s backyard. But he, Gilmore, and Casa Maria Luigia head chef Jessica Rosvall had more in mind than that.
First, we transformed the recipes and stories into “slow food, fast food.” This is a huge book containing her 85 recipes and stories documenting Casa Maria Luigia since it opened in 2019. Mr. Gilmore then began renovating the old carriage house and barn next door, which he had acquired over the past year. That’s when Bottura came across Mike’s Bidlo painting, a meticulous reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s Drip painting, which straddles the line between original and interpretation.
“The moment I saw it [Bidlo’s] Work, I was hooked. I said, ‘This is our barbecue,”’ he said. travel + leisure. “That’s a good thing because the barbecue we do here is more than just barbecue. Conceptualization…The plate is very conceptual, so it’s different from the classic barbecue where you smoke and serve it yourself. It’s so much more than that. is.”
Tableau Vivant
Walking around the villa, Acetaea, Casa Maria Luigia produces traditional balsamic vinegar, aged in 1,400 barrels next to contemporary art installations by Ingo Mauer, Kehinde Wiley and Olafur Eliasson.
A few more steps and you come face to face with Al Gatto Verde’s kitchen. An open, exposed set with a green tiled backdrop, his stunning domed MAM wood-fired oven, and the highlight is his Tuscan grill. Rosvall and his team move with an innate synchronicity behind the counter in a kind of dynamic, and we sit at one of the garden tables with batched Negronis aged in on-site balsamic vinegar barrels. I sat down and got ready for the show.
“Please watch from the front row.” [the] The kitchen is functional,” Rosvall said. “It’s like watching a family working together. We really wanted to experience that great sense of openness and sharing again.”
Openness is also fundamental to Bottura & Co’s philosophy of zero-waste sustainability, and at Al Gatto Verde, this is reflected not just in the plates, but in the space as well. MAM ovens are equipped with pollution-free tanks to reduce emissions, the roof is lined with solar panels, and specially developed Mapei ceramic tiles collect rainwater to water the grass beneath your feet. will be used.
For dinner, head to the dining room, a minimalist and chic space with 10 tables. The walls are painted a vintage Ferrari green and discreetly decorated with art such as Pearson’s Fate and Bidlo’s Not Pollock. As Gilmore told me, the crowd is cold. Artistic glasses, jeans, golden goose sneakers, and multilingual. The secret is out.
We chose eight beautiful dishes, a tasting menu that delves deep into terroir, tradition (both Bottura’s Modena roots and Rosval’s Canadian), sustainability, seasonality, and, of course, barbecue. Almost every element of each dish was transformed by the grill or wood-fired oven.
not mussels Trompe l’oeil, mussels made with blue crab (a crustacean that invades the Adriatic Sea), pork belly, and green apple. Cotechino and Dragon’s BloodJapanese-style fried pork sausage dough marinated in juicy plum sauce. Agnello da Montreal a San Damaso Rozval’s journey from his Canadian hometown to rural Modena is gastronomically reimagined with lamb dusted with the burnt edges of bread, placed next to peach mostarda.
Every bite is amazing and then one of the craziest desserts I have ever experienced is served in front of me. Cielo Terra Mare (earth, air, sea). What looks like a pale pink rose sculpture is made from carbon semifreddo made from oven ashes, stuffed with tangy raspberries and caviar, placed on top of a kelp and seaweed cookie, and soaked in rose-flavored seawater. thing. This dessert is very much Al Gatto Verde, a deep dive into terroir, tradition, sustainability and, of course, barbecue.
It’s all in the name, Gilmore revealed. “Al gutt verde. Cats and greenery…environmental awareness. Uniqueness and innovation.”
Buy the best travel experiences here
(Featured image credit: Lido Vannucchi)
This article first appeared on travelandleisure.com.
Related article: What and where inspires 5 of Asia’s best female chefs