White Gold by Devanshi Mody
Featured Hotel in Piedmont
Le Meridien Lingotto
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If you haven’t a taste for clandestine nocturnal activities in cold wet fields involving truffle dogs, but you do have the palate for the pungent prestige food, this is the time of the year to relish the fruit (or the truffle, as the case might be…) of another’s labour.
Absolutely Alba
The Piedmontese see their region as Italy’s gastronomic capital. The Tuscans might vociferously challenge this, but Piedmont produces our dear white truffle and the finest Italian wines - be they the famous Barolos and Barbarescos, or the delicate sweet wines of Asti.
Arguably the most interesting young chef in Piedmont is the dashing and massively talented Davide Palluda. It’s unfathomable that his restaurant Al Enoteca has only one Michelin star. The seduction starts as you traverse the impressive doorway, while a flight of stairs leads to a contemporary space with sexy toilets (designer toilets bode well!)
The good-looking chef is the king of the kitchen, while his stylishly attired sister reigns over the dining area. If only the service were as slick: a curious feature of many Piedmontese Michelin-starred restaurants is that only one or two people serve the packed restaurant. But you are in Italy - besides, the local charm compensates for minor lapses, and the creative cuisine steals the show.
Whilst most Piedmontese Michelin-starred restaurants offer traditional cuisine, Davide Palluda presents exciting innovations – his textures are especially extraordinary. During the course of degustation at any gastronomic restaurant, there is inevitably a course or two that disappoints. But Palluda sustained the seduction, course after course, from amuse bouche through to the fantastic deserts to the melt-in-your-mouth mignardises with coffee.
It’s rare that a chef holds my attention over a four-hour meal, but Palluda excelled. Besides, he wasn’t gratuitously innovative and didn’t use attention-seeking shock tactic food, as is the trend with most young chefs. The food actually tasted good. Besides, the chef has a sense of humour, which added to the flavour. I told him he would have two Michelin stars were he in Paris, and he quipped that he’d be bankrupt paying rent for a restaurant there.
I am told that celebrated three-Michelin-star Parisian chef Pascal Barbot has travelled for white polenta chez Davide Palluda, and other French culinary kings have also deigned to grace the venue. And to think, I almost missed this gorgeous, gorgeous cuisine because the restaurant is in Canale, outside Alba.
Another must-do is Michelin-starred Guido, which introduced “slow food”. Recipes are traditional, but cooking technique is avant garde, and this Piedmontese institution lures the world’s who’s who. The late Mr Guido’s widow now manages two branches, with a son in each restaurant – one in Pollenzo and the other at the Relais St Maurizio. The latter, set in a cavernous underground cellar jazzed up with contemporary art, is more glamorous (Robert De Niro and Monica Bellucci have dined); whilst the former - also set in a historic red-brick building - is bare and canteen-like.
Service at both is equally delicious, with two charming young brothers (who look like they’ve walked off Gucci ads) running the show. However, for the hardcore gastronome, the food is slightly better in Pollenzo. The menu is mostly the same, but the less fancy venue offers food with better textures and flavours - try the Piedmontese speciality of cheese fondue and celeriac with white truffle. Linguine with white truffle is delicious too, especially as Mrs Guido still does the hand-made pasta. Leave room for little pots of cream concoctions with coffee. Mamma Mia!
Michelin-starred Chau di Taurnivento is seemingly the most popular restaurant with locals. The views over vine-carpeted inclines from the elevated, glass encased restaurant are magnificent, but lost on diners who prefer to come after dark. Cuisine is traditional. The house speciality comes in a wooden box with an egg inside, which sits partly on cheese fondue and is duly showered with white truffle. No less remarkable is the signature silky ravioli that arrives on a nest of intricately woven grass and herbs.
The cheese trolley is superb, but the restaurant is renowned for its beat-us-if-you-dare wine cellar (they even serve fantastic vintage wines by the glass). But we suspect those who hang around until 2.00am are attacking entire bottles, if not ransacking the region’s finest wine cellar.
Antine - the first-floor Barbaresco restaurant - lacks the ambiance expected of a Michelin-starred eatery. However, if you’re a gnocchi freak, then this is a good place for it. The real surprise is the Barbaresco ice cream.
For non-Michelin-starred restaurants, try simple white truffle dishes at cosy Eno Club, which was good enough for the King of Savoy. They do good pastas with truffle, too. The ambiance is lively and the service is ultra efficient.
At Dolce Vitti, the young Chef Bruno attempts to bring the region’s sweetness to your plate. The flavours are clean and fresh, and Bruno notably makes fabulous breads. He has cooked for the Pope, too.
Piedmont is as known for its wines as well as its white truffles. The former can be as much a connoisseur’s delight, and certainly as unaffordable, if you’re shopping at Gaja. Visit their cellars and cantina set in the Barbaresco castle, constructed centuries ago by a wealthy merchant who bought himself a title. The Gaja saga is a fascinating one and their wine production techniques are so stringent, they apparently merit the astronomical prices.
I especially enjoyed visiting the smaller and very exclusive Marquesi di Gressy, one of the other celebrated producers of Barbaresco wine. Here, the owner is a real Marquis and is hugely entertaining. After Marcus has taken you on a tour of the incredible wine cellars with their humidity-generating fungus-covered walls, and got you to try the award-winning wines (the walls of the cantina are covered in awards galore), the Marquis himself joins the fray and will even drive you around in his sports car.
Barolo is the finer and more famous wine, and no visit is complete without visiting its oldest producer, the Marquesi di Barolo. Incidentally, it is the only vinery that houses historic wine Tonneaux, and it also an unbroken collection of vintages from the late 1800s. Particularly interesting is the private collection in an enclave, which houses wines that were hidden during World War II to keep Hitler away.
Over lunch in the cantina’s restaurant, the owner and lively host Mr Ernesto professes a passion for producing good wines and not succumbing to marketing gimmicks. Someone draws a parallel between Chopard, whose success depends on strategic marketing, not quality products, and the lesser-known jewellers whose excellent products are the prerogative of the discreet secret elite.
Discretion is a Piedmontese obsession I discovered when I met Barolo’s other producers. I randomly enquired of Guido’s owner if he knew anyone who could drive me to my hotel, and a young couple immediately agreed. I talked to them about my vineyard escapades, but they only presented their card when they dropped me off. It was for Giancomo Contermo, one of the most exclusive producers of Barolo wines.
Asti is the region of the nectar-like Muscadet, and the finest producer is Ca Del Principe. The wine tasting in their cantina is a delightfully traditional affair, where the entire family of aristocrats convene at aperitivo time to relish the soft, sweet wines with cheese and Piedmontese hazelnut cake. The brothers who run the show are lovely boys; little wonder they have been producing award-winning wines for three years running.
If you can’t get yourself to Alba, then the Alba truffle will come to you. Try three-Michelin-star Italian institution Dal Pescatore outside Mantua. It’s out of the way, but Mr Santini, the owner, and his wife, mother and young son Giovanni make pasta using age-old recipes handed down from generation to generation. It serves the world’s best ravioli, remarkably textured, with which you’ll have white truffles - of course. The restaurant is known for its Mamma in the Cucina style, but there’s now a talented thirty-year-old son cooking up trouble too.
I can only bear to eat risotto chez Paris’s three-Michelin-star Guy Savoy. Whilst most Italians pooh-pooh French attempts at Italian cuisine, some top Italian chefs confess that M Savoy has not only mastered the art of Italian cooking, but can teach the Italians a thing or two.
I certainly think they can learn to make risotto from M Savoy: a perfectionist par excellence, he makes perfectly al dente risotto, exquisitely balanced in flavour and mercifully not inundated with a superfluity of parmesan and salt (which is the case even at some three-Michelin-star Italian restaurants). But one has come to expect perfection at Guy Savoy, where everything effuses art - from the art on the wall, to the culinary artistry to, indeed, the art of superb service. I later learn that the dish wasn’t officially on the menu when I visited, but the chef acquired white truffles for me because I had requested them.
Indeed, I was overwhelmed to learn that M Savoy had prepared me a personalised menu degustation, with sublime creations like his beetroot and chestnut seasonal specialities, and a pear desert. The subtle play of complex flavours, fragrances and textures made this the best meal of my life.
Will keep you coming back, well after the white truffle season is over…
Le Crillon’s celebrated Les Ambassadeurs’ two-Michelin-starred Jean-François Piège has almost become synonymous with truffles in Paris. After all, the chef hosted a celebrity white truffle gala at the restaurant, and last year presided as the “Godfather of Truffles” during the truffle auction in Alba. He continues to offer the famous “casse-croûte” de noix de saint Jacques.
Last year I had silken spaghetti in parmesan topped with almonds and truffle, jazzed up with chestnut. Alas, this year I was presented a less elaborate green salad with white truffle shavings, whilst the spaghetti with seasonal black truffles was not quite what I have come to expect of a master technician like M Piège. Blame the sous chefs, I say, for the master makes no mistakes.
Paris’s most chi-chi Italians wouldn’t be caught dead eating pasta, let alone anything else with white truffle in a French Michelin-starred restaurant. To an Italian, it is even sacrilegious to serve white truffle with anything other than the usual pasta, meat, egg and other regional variations. So where does the well-heeled Paris-based Italian with a taste for white truffle go, when he can’t quite make it to Alba? Well, to the super stylish Mori Venice Bar.
This is one of the few places in Paris where you find more guests speaking in Italian than in French, American or Japanese. The restaurant specialises in Venetian cuisine and does an extensive - if not gastronomic - white truffle menu. Stay to chat with the charismatic owner M Massimo Mori.