World’s best impress and refresh: Piazza Duomo
Piazza Duomo in Alba, Italy, is one of the top 50 restaurants on earth and, surprisingly, not hard to book.
Refresh, refresh, refresh. Your finger frantically clicks, desperately hoping the website of that world-famous restaurant will yield the magic button labelled “Book now”.
Those who live to eat can often be disappointed when it comes to securing a table in a destination restaurant. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Although it sits at No 17 in the World’s 50 Best List, you can make a booking at Italy’s Piazza Duomo with ease.
In a watermelon-pink dining room behind a purple door down an innocuous alley in Alba, chef Enrico Crippa (Bras, Spain’s El Bulli) champions Piedmontese cooking with technique as sharp as the nose of a truffle dog. No surprise, as his teachers were three modern masters, Michel Bras of the eponymous Bras restaurant in Laguiole, El Bulli’s Ferran Adria and pioneering Italian chef Gualtiero Marchesi.
From hazelnut sourdough to vegetables from the chef’s garden, none of the main ingredients on his menu comes from more than 50km away.
Charming multilingual waiters deftly dance you through the menu, clearing and resetting the table as though performing for the Teatro alla Scala. Sommeliers guide you through a pair of regional and world lists, leaving the bottles close by the table for those who tend to drain their wine matches instantly (er, I’m speaking about my stepfather here).
The table is laden with appetisers looking like a Kandinsky painting, while salads appear from the kitchen at dizzying pace. Insalata 21, 31, 41, 51 (a reference to the number of seasonal ingredients used) is a dainty arrangement of leaves, flowers and herbs finishing with a palate-cleansing dish of orange and dashi, whereas egg and eggs salad (garden leaves, shaved black truffle, cured egg yolk) looks daunting in its size but is demolished in a few delicious crisp-creamy-earthy bites.
Raw prawns with violets, beetroot and hazelnuts is as refined and as pretty a dish as you’ll ever see, but it’s a risotto of Italian sturgeon caviar and powdered mastic that has me gripping the side of the table in admiration. The autumnal woodiness of the mastic, the delicate brininess of the caviar, the unctuous arborio … superlatives fail me.
Crippa is no less adept with meat. A farce of speck is wrapped in a braised leaf of radicchio, while a dish of roasted pigeon, as pink as the walls, with “textures of cabbage” is more rustic but no less successful.
Criticisms? Barely there. A tangy sphere of salsa verde and anchovies with a golden pepper ‘‘bouillabaisse’’ is a tad unbalanced, while tartars of veal and langoustine, disguised as black and green olives, have a whiff of the gimmicky about them.
Desserts range from the subdued (a seasonal stew of fruit and nuts, warmed with the aromas of baking spice), to the decadent (whipped cream profiteroles with a fragile crack of tempered chocolate). Petit fours and aged grappa round off the afternoon.
Our fellow diners are a varied bunch. From a restaurateur from Manchester dining with a local Barolo merchant, to a young German couple celebrating an occasion, to Quay’s Peter Gilmore, there’s a palpable enthusiasm for food and wine in the room; no one’s here to tick off a bucket list.
At €200 ($286) for the cheapest degustation, even the most expensive of Australian restaurants would scramble to reach these prices, but while Piazza Duomo doesn’t offer a hot documentary or a publicity-mad chef, it does offer a world-class experience, one based in time and place. Trust me. You’ll be refreshed.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants will be announced in Melbourne in April next year.