Turin, Italy – I sat with the three chefs on jet-black stools surrounded by white drapes. We were discussing cuisine in Piedmont, a land your grandmother’s kitchen likely has never known, and my surroundings offered a bizarre contrast in old and new.
The Piedmont restaurant, P Food & Wine, serves an Italian cuisine once treasured by Roman emperors in a chic black-and- white décor straight out of an Upper East Side eatery that opened last month – which is exactly when P Food & Wine did.
It stands on Piazza Castello, which dates to the 1300s. Back then it served as the seat of power for the House of Savoy, a feudal family that ruled Piedmont in the 11th century. Last month it served as the plaza where rad snowboarders were presented Olympic medals.
The contrast in old and new symbolizes the old and new of Piedmont cuisine. This style of Italian cooking has been around since the first truffle was discovered in these foothills of the Italian Alps a couple millennia ago and now is making headway into the American market.
Maybe it’s due to Turin’s Winter Olympics, where “The Today Show” had chefs whipping up local delicacies. I find “The Today Show” immensely annoying, but must admit I
became hungry every time I passed the set on Piazza San Carlo.
Maybe it’s due to Piedmont’s Barolo wine, arguably the best red wine in the world and one that can make mac and cheese taste good.
Then again, maybe Americans are discovering what Italians learned centuries ago. As P Food & Wine chef Davide Palluda told me, “The modern Piedmontese food is probably the most authentic in Italy.”
Many Italys
Keep in mind the term “Italian food” is only referred to by people outside Italy. After the breakup of the Roman Empire in 476, Italy didn’t become a unified nation again until 1861. Until then, Italy consisted of independent regions, all with their own dialects, values and, of course, food.
While Italy eventually came under one flag, the Italian kitchen never did. Each region has kept its own distinct tastes, all as varied as the shapes of pasta. I have had pasta amatriciana (tomato, bacon and a dash of chile) in Lazio, sepia (black squid) in Veneto and wiener schnitzel (breaded veal) in Alto Adige.
While you’re reading this, I will likely be dining on pasta con le sarde (pasta with sardines) in Sicily.
“You can’t put a label on ‘Italian,”‘ said Scott Conant, who owns two Italian-style restaurants in New York – Alto and L’Impero – and was a “Today Show” guest last week. “It’s just unfair.”
After three weeks at the Olympics, my second time to Turin, I usually awarded Piedmont meals a gold medal. Then again, sometimes I found it as unpalatable as curling. But mostly I found it heartier than Sardinian food and more interesting than Umbrian food. Picture Italian food with a French twist, and you have Piedmont cuisine.
The French connection
What is that, specifically? Resting on France’s southeast border, there is a heavy French influence from the thick creams to the fattier cheeses to game birds such as guinea fowl, pigeon, turkey and geese.
Piedmont cooks use butter instead of olive oil. It’s heavier, but in one of the coldest regions in Italy – temperature at the Opening Ceremonies dropped near 20 degrees – it feels better next to a warm fire.
“I love it because of the variety of food,” Conant said. “Because it’s so soulful.”
Conant, 35, sat just off the “Today Show” set in a cafe decorated with backlit Roman statues. (Note to Italy: Thanks for not letting in Starbucks.) His Alto restaurant on Madison Avenue is influenced from his many trips to Piedmont, one of his favorite regions in Italy.
“That’s what makes Piemonte different,” he said. “Because it is so close to the mountains, you get a lot of that Alpine-style cooking.”
Some of the dishes here could feed the German bobsled teams. There is bollito, a mishmash of turkey, beef, pork, veal, chicken, geese, cabbage, potatoes, onions and lentils, with too many sauces to list here. There’s fonduta, a fondue of cream, cheeses, butter, eggs and milk and served with shavings of white truffles.
Or agnolotti, ring-shaped pasta filled with ham, minced veal and spices.
“Of course it is different,” Palluda said. “The common point of all Italy is the nature of the territory. The territory is important.”
Hog-wild for truffles
The signature ingredient of Piedmont, of course, is the white truffle. Tartufo bianco is held with the same regard around here as Turin’s championship soccer team, Juventus. The difference is locals won’t go to the lengths for tickets as they will for truffles. Truffle fans get up at dawn and dig into the earth for the little mushroomlike delicacies, occasionally with the help of diligent – and very hungry – hogs.
White truffles were a favorite food of Emperor Claudius of first-
century Rome, Madame Pompadour of 18th-century Paris and Marilyn Monroe of 20th-century California, among a few million others.
Unfortunately, truffle season is painfully short. If they’re not picked in October, November and December, trust them no more than you would eating a mushroom out of your backyard. But if you’re here in the fall, order them shaved over pasta or eggs. You won’t regret the price, which is about a third what you would pay in the States.
“(Piedmont food) is the most authentic in Italy because Piedmont is real conservative,” Palluda said. “Being conservative is lucky and unlucky at the same time. It’s lucky because in the years the product is kept at the highest quality. It is unlucky because it changes just a little bit.”
Then again, sometimes change isn’t good.
Eating around Turin
I went to four Piedmont restaurants here, and they ran the gastronomical spectrum. My first, and always my favorite, was Tre Galline. Appropriately named “Three Hens” in Italian, the wood-paneled restaurant at the confluence of narrow cobblestone streets in romantic Quartiere Vecchio (Old Town), Tre Galline is perhaps Turin’s most authentic Piedmont restaurant.
On the menu is the Boiled Meat Trolley, a macabre collection of abdomen, muscle, cheek, tongue, chicken, oxtail and pork sausage, for 25 euro (about $30). It looks like something a wolf would order. I settled into a plate of oven-baked shin of veal so lean I could cut it with a fork.
My friend, a foreign correspondent in Cairo, had risotto mixed with sausage and local nebbiolo wine, one of the best risottos I’ve ever tried.
I had a similar experience in the hustle and bustle of Piazza Vittorio Veneto on Via Po, the main porticoed avenue that runs from the jampacked Medals Plaza in Piazza Castello. Porto di Savona is in a house built in 1830 with oil paintings hanging from the Dijon-colored walls.
There are no English menus. I heard no English-speaking staff members. With Olympic fans from a dozen countries reveling just outside the window, inside we had stepped into 19th-century Piedmont.
Kevin Dale, our quickly transformed Italophile sports editor, Post sportswriter Bill Briggs and I had a massive feast. I had an antipasto misto of assorted local cold meats. For my primo piatto (first dish) I had lamb agnolotti. My secondo piatto was novarese, a slab of lean beef covered in tangy, gravylike gorgonzola sauce swimming with cheese chunks.
Topped with a 2003 nebbiolo, the meal made Dale and Briggs speed-dial their significant others, just to make sure they knew that a perfect restaurant awaited them when they arrived.
If they were really adventurous, they could take them to the high-end Loncanda Mongreno. Call it Piedmont fusion cuisine. That’s the only way I can describe the eight-course meal of Piedmont dishes with the personal twists of young chef Pier Bussetti.
Bussetti, 38, has worked in the U.S., Japan, France and Spain and tries combining the cultures. Sometimes it works, such as the faraona al vino rosso (guinea fowl in red wine) or the soubriques (meat pancakes with herbs). But not many restaurants in Piedmont serve acciughe al verde (anchovy purée), nor should they. It’s ghastly.
So was the minestra di ceci (chickpea cream in rosemary sauce).
That brings me back to P Food & Wine, a temporary restaurant set up just for the Olympics, where I sat with the chefs and nibbled on their collection of local desserts ranging from meringue with chocolate to grappa-filled cherries.
I was told that the response has been so huge they may make it permanent.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road. He can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
