Reale: Why Italy’s greatest restaurant has embraced vegetarianism

Castel di Sangro, Italy (CNN) — It has been named Italy’s greatest restaurant, but when its prospects assume which means they’re going to be served upscale variations of the nation’s basic meat and fish dishes, they’re in for a shock.

In a placing departure that’s redefining what Italian meals is, the tasting menu on the Reale restaurant, set in a former monastery in Castel di Sangro, a city surrounded by the Appenine mountains in Italy’s jap Abruzzo area, is vegetarian.

However that hasn’t hampered its rise to the highest. Reale’s three Michelin-star chef Niko Romito just lately picked up the award for being named Italy’s primary restaurant by Gambero Rosso, the nation’s most historic information to eating venues.

It is an accolade he is delighted has come at a time when his fantastic eating venue has switched to a meat-free menu.

“We made a radical option to have a vegetarian tasting menu,” he tells CNN. “To obtain this award whereas having a vegetarian menu implies that a critic understands our work and the extent of our analysis.”

“It is as if we’re writing a brand new web page now; our dishes and work do not exist in gastronomic literature. It is new adrenaline, new power.”

Reale’s location between sea and mountains means the restaurant has been capable of faucet into the remoted area’s fascinating culinary traditions, which embrace foraging for mushrooms within the fall, and cultivating saffron in Navelli.

Easy, wholesome, native

Reale’s kitchen additionally re-interprets Italian fantastic eating. Its cooks clear broccoli, stripping outer leaves and, as an alternative of throwing them away, use them because the star of one of many principal dishes of its new vegetarian-tasting menu.

The boundary-pushing does not cease there. In addition to a boutique lodge and culinary faculty, the restaurant’s grounds home an experimental pecorino winery.

It is the proper location, says Romito.

“We’re in Castel di Sangro, Abruzzo, the greenest area of Europe, surrounded by nature. Greens symbolize all of this,” he says. “I believed if I did not do that, who else would? It is extra pure that I do that in an setting like this than somebody within the middle of Milan. It displays every little thing we’ve round us.”

Reale shouldn’t be the primary Michelin-starred restaurant to supply a vegetarian menu. In 2020, Eleven Madison Park in New York Metropolis introduced it was going vegan — a placing departure from a luxurious line up that featured suckling pig and entire roast duck with daikon and plum.

The pandemic intensified scrutiny of animal-based diets for social and environmental causes.

Nonetheless, Reale is the primary in Italy, the place robust gastronomic identities outline meals, and fine-dining specifically — with heavy emphasis on meat, fish and wealthy sauces.

Romito says his vegetarian shift can also be a strategy to affect and encourage eating places of every kind in Italy to make use of easy, wholesome components that develop domestically.

“If I consider legumes in Abruzzo, chickpeas, lentils and beans, these usually are not usually utilized in fantastic eating. So if fantastic eating begins utilizing these components, it influences on a regular basis eating places,” he says.

“I am occupied with altering the paradigm for cooks, but in addition of the consumer that involves eat who realizes greens will be much more thrilling than meat or fish.”

A brand new story

When receiving his Gambero Rosso greatest restaurant award in Italy on October 24 at a ceremony in Rome, Romito introduced his fourth-generation greengrocer, Alessandro La Valle, on stage with him.

“With out him, sure dishes would not be doable,” Romito says. La Valle’s encyclopedic information of produce and the place to supply it all year long helped him assemble his menu, he provides.

Romito says his meals philosophy has at all times been deeply grounded to Abruzzo and its native producers.

“Immediately, a consumer has to eat in a spot that is considering consuming nicely and utilizing components that do much less injury to the setting, and cook dinner with components that, till just lately, had been thought of boring and banal,” says the chef.

“However the true distinction is when a chef could make an ingredient everyone knows nicely and inform a brand new story.

“The creativity of a chef is to worth these components and analysis — that is the distinction. If somebody eats the dish and says, ‘wow, a broccoli leaf will be this good,’ then you’re making a distinction and altering how components and the creativity behind cooking are understood.”

Romito, who offers his title to a collection of upscale eating venues like Il Ristorante Niko Romito in Bvlgari lodges in Milan, Shanghai, Beijing, Dubai and Paris, says he additionally wished to make the restaurant extra accessible and democratize fantastic eating by reducing the price of his tasting menu to draw prospects who wouldn’t sometimes go to a three-star Michelin restaurant.

“It is a youthful, extra gastronomically educated crowd; they wish to have the complete expertise and perceive the philosophy behind the menu,” he says.

“The worth helps quite a bit. Immediately I had a 26-year-old on the kitchen desk; I by no means went at that age; it is superb!” says Romito.

Reale’s 14-course tasting menu is presently priced at round 170 euros (about $176). There are nonetheless meat and fish dishes obtainable on the a la carte menu.

Romito and his sister Cristiana Romito, who manages the entrance of the home, each took a raffle to return to their Abruzzo hometown, Rivisondoli, to take over the household bakery and trattoria after the lack of their father.

Trial and error

Niko Romito had been pursuing his economics diploma on the time. His mom, Giovanna, tells CNN: “I simply was unsure at first, to go away Rome the place we had been residing, the place there are extra prospects, however he mentioned to me, ‘mother, it’s important to imagine!’

“He was proper.”

Inside seven years, they’d their first Michelin star, rapidly adopted by a second. They then determined to maneuver their restaurant to the ex-monastery in Castel di Sangro, about 9 miles away from their unique location.

Cristiana Romito’s work managing the restaurant and eating room earned her the World’s Greatest Eating Room Supervisor title, by Les Grandes Tables du Monde, in 2019.

Like her brother, she had no prior expertise within the restaurant trade and shared the philosophy of democratizing the fine-dining expertise, together with efforts to cater to differently-abled friends.

“I requested the kitchen to chop the meals for our friends who could not use their hand to chop with a knife and fork in a discreet approach that would not be seen,” she tells CNN. “On the finish of the meal, the visitor mentioned ‘nobody has ever performed that for me.'”

Self-taught, obsessive about analysis and the transformation of components which can be simply accessible to even the house cook dinner, Niko Romito credit the pandemic and extended lockdowns for giving him time to reassess the idea of fantastic eating and his subsequent drive for sustainability, no waste and investing in human capital.

“For years, I’ve labored with greens, so it was actually pure to create a vegetarian menu.” he says.

“I work in a really specific approach when researching a brand new ingredient. I by no means know the place I’ll find yourself.

“Whereas working, experimenting and testing, one thing goes unsuitable, I strive once more, then the components rework — and also you begin chipping away, and the ingredient begins to disclose issues. You be taught from the method. All of the trial and error results in information that typically applies to fully completely different functions — so you’re taking all of it in.”