I approach Gambero Rosso, a restaurant in the Tuscan coastal town of San Vincenzo, with more than a little trepidation, not because the chef has a reputation for being gruff and autocratic (difficult chefs I can deal with), but because it has been called the best restaurant in Italy. Now, it may well be possible to designate fairly the “best restaurant” in a small town or in a neighborhood that has only a few serious eating places, but when somebody announces that such-and-such is the best restaurant in, say, California or … well, Italy, the statement seems so patently indefensible that I always think, “Oh, grow up!” Anyway, I’m generally allergic to “best restaurants.” They tend to be pretentious and unconscionably expensive; they tend to have attitude. And even if they’re very good, they’re never as good as you somehow expect them to be.
But the evidence in favor of Gambero Rosso is considerable: The celebrated French restaurant critic François Simon, of Le Figaro, calls the Michelin two-star his favorite restaurant in the world. It’s the highest-ranking Italian eating establishment (and “highest climber”) in the current The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, a British website. The two most important dining guides on Italy, Gambero Rosso (no relation) and the Guide de l’Espresso, give it, along with the eccentric Vissani, in the Umbrian town of Baschi, their top scores.
If Gambero Rosso is not better known to American diners, it’s probably because of its location, south of Livorno on the rather ambitiously named Etruscan Riviera. Unless you’re touring the newly prominent wineries of the Maremma (super-Tuscans like Ornellaia and Sassicaia are produced in the region), or perhaps visiting L’Andana, Alain Ducasse’s fantasy version of a Tuscan farm estate, about 35 miles to the southeast of San Vincenzo (see “Tuscany à la Ducasse,” page 42), you’d probably have no reason to be near the place. It’s in Tuscany, sure, but it’s at least a two-hour drive from Florence or the Chianti region, and this particular area has no tourist attractions or luxury hotels.
It probably isn’t because of his restaurant’s relative isolation that Fulvio Pierangelini, chef and co-owner—with his wife, Emanuela—of Gambero Rosso, has been called, in the subtitle of a book about him by journalist Raffaella Prandi, “il grande solista della cucina italiana”—the great soloist of Italian cuisine. And it certainly isn’t because he’s alone in his kitchen: He has a staff of 12 at each service, in addition to himself, to prepare lunches and dinners for a maximum of 24 diners at a time. He is a soloist because, as I am soon to learn, he is a self-taught, intuitive chef who plays by his own rules; he is part of no movement and chases no trends. Molecular gastronomy doesn’t interest him. He just cooks. I’m about to find out how well.
When I walk through the door of Gambero Rosso, Pierangelini is standing there. A ruggedly handsome man with curly, slightly shaggy hair, he does have a touch of the ursine about him—but he seems agreeable enough, and when I mention a mutual friend of ours in Los Angeles, he breaks into a broad smile. As soon as I’ve been shown to my table in the cheery little dining room—it suggests the solarium in a seaside villa—he appears and asks that I allow him to make me a menu. Of course I agree. (Three menus are offered, besides the à la carte dishes—the last of these, “The Grand Menu of Fulvio Pierangelini,” chosen “at the total discretion of the chef.”)
The first thing set in front of me, after a bottle of Gratta-macco Bianco, a barrel-fermented Vermentino from nearby Bolgheri (the wine list here is immense and full of treasures), is a small mound of baccalà—an Italian version of brandade—topped with slices of sandalwood-hued white truffle drizzled with a few drops of olive oil. I eat it in two bites, and almost miss it; then I realize what I’ve just had. The salt cod was delicate and creamy. The truffles weren’t gassy and overwhelming, but tasted earthy and round, leaving a faint glow in the mouth. The oil was buttery and strong but with none of the pepper or leafy bite some Tuscan oils can have (it comes from a nearby farm run by Pierangelini’s son, Fulvietto). Together, they formed a perfect aperitivo, light but pronounced enough in flavor to wake the palate right up.
I pay more attention to the next dish, described on the menu simply as “sandwich di spigola (pesce crudo)”—sandwich of sea bass (raw fish). The uncooked spigola, mild and sweet, has been sliced into translucent sheets, then stacked with wisps of truffle in between, scattered with bits of samphire (a member of the carrot family) and a few perfect baby greens, and dressed with more of that olive oil and some fine, well-aged aceto balsamico tradizionale—which bears as much resemblance to industrial supermarket “balsamic” as Parmigiano-Reggiano does to Velveeta.
The whole thing is just so straightforward, so guileless, that my first thought is, Where is the chef’s hand in all this? Then I realize that the chef’s hand is in the fact that his hand isn’t obvious.
The courses keep coming (the service is friendly but crisp, with no unnecessary flourishes). First, there is an extraordinary “chaud-froid” of tissue-thin slices of raw red shrimp topped with pieces of warm, perfectly cooked John Dory; then a few exemplary scampi, lightly cooked, with silky purées of cauliflower and celery; some impeccably fresh small scallops, each stippled with minuscule pink dots of mortadella (!), alongside slices of lightly caramelized fennel and a pool of applesauce (which, however counterintuitively, offset the flavor and texture of the meat-tinged scallops nicely).
Next comes a minestrone asciutto (dry minestrone) composed of very flavorful, amazingly tiny vegetables—carrots the size of roof nails, turnips not much bigger than peas—with two rosy ingot-shaped pieces of fresh tuna-like palamita marinated in ginger and other spices; and slightly chewy agnolotti, with a rich golden dough filled with intense, cooked-down fresh tomatoes and topped with a “little salad” of tiny squid, scampi, and shrimp, all barely cooked.
Two things are becoming pretty clear: First, Pierangelini is a master with seafood, a man who knows how to choose the finest fish and shellfish (journalist Prandi calls him “a talent scout for ingredients”) and cook them to absolutely the optimum point; second, occasional unexpected combinations notwithstanding, his food is surprisingly simple and pure.
The meal continues with Gambero Rosso’s most imitated dish (there are versions of it all over Italy), a chickpea purée that somehow seems both rustic and refined, inset with sweet, juicy shrimp. Then two more signature dishes: a zuppetta (little soup) of rich Burrata cheese cloaking ravioli filled with salty herring and garnished with shavings of gray-mullet bottarga, surprisingly delicate for all its briny authority; and a dish the restaurant has been serving for 25 years: ravioli, some white, some black (with cuttlefish ink), filled with fish-based forcemeat and moistened with seafood cream. Finally, a row of moscardini—baby octopuses, almost Nantucket red in color, squeaky and sweet, on top of sauces of almond and red pepper that taste vividly of exactly what they’re made of.
Dessert is out of the question, but I manage to nibble at an assortment of Tuscan Pecorinos of various ages and strengths and one strong gray goat cheese garnished with scallion marmalade, chestnut honey, oil-packed baby artichokes, and a salad of uncommon ovoli mushrooms (Amanita caesarea), faintly earthy, faintly lemony. Then thank you and good night.
The next day, I return to Gambero Rosso for lunch, this time sitting at a long table in the restaurant’s front room, a room otherwise crowded with books and magazines, sofas, and a breakfront full of liquors, from rare Romano Levi grappas to ancient Armagnacs. This is nothing so grand as a “chef’s table,” but it is a table at which Pierangelini and his wife eat a little or have a glass of wine when they have a moment, and sit after lunch and dinner service with friends.
Pierangelini, I learn, as he stops to talk between kitchen tasks, was born in Rome in 1953 but moved with his family to this part of Tuscany when he was six. He learned to cook from his mother and liked to make meals for friends and schoolmates. One of his early specialties was spaghetti alla carbonara, to which he added smoked salmon. One evening, with no wine available for the task, he made a risotto with Campari. His first official cooking job came in 1977, when he took over the kitchen at a bar and disco called Casa Rossa, in Baratti, just south of San Vincenzo. He liked the work, and early in 1980 he and Emanuela bought a derelict summer seafood restaurant, already called Gambero Rosso, in San Vincenzo. Not long afterward, Pierangelini first made his chickpea purée with shrimp—with that dish, his father told him, he could conquer the world.
He is certainly conquering me: My lunch begins with a piece of precisely cooked dentice (a breamlike fish called dentex in English) with some tender curls of trippa di baccalà (salt-cod stomach). From then on, the meal is landlocked: a rich ravioli of chestnut and pumpkin in pumpkin sauce; meltingly soft tortelli of pumpkin almost obscured by a shower of white truffle slices; round, deckle-edge sweet-onion ravioli, glistening in butter and striped with that excellent aceto balsamico. Then, with a bottle of elegant Sassicaia, a main course of paper-thin slices of moist, herb-flavored suckling pig (from a herd of heritage cinta senese pigs raised by Fulvietto Pierangelini) arrives on a bed of potatoes puréed with olive oil and sliced sautéed porcini, with a fine excelsior of crisp potato shreds on top and a cannellone filled with minced pork shoulder and topped with—what else?—white truffles. Damn, this food is good. So, er, is this the best restaurant in Italy? Who cares? And leave me alone. Can’t you see that I’m eating?
At last year’s Identità Golose (“Epicurean Identities”) gastronomic conference in Milan, while other speakers were addressing such subjects as “Sea Flavor: Pasta Which Is Not Pasta” and “Cooking with Nitrogen: Iced Semolino of Olive Oil,” Pierangelini offered the strictly no-nonsense “Simple Thoughts (On an Egg and a Pig).”
“The first step in my cuisine,” Pierangelini tells me, “is to find the best materials, even those that others can’t find. Then it’s a matter of how I work with them. One must know them, feel them; one must decide all that one can do with them and still remain natural. To cook like this is to walk a tightrope, way up high, with no net. If I fall, I fall.”
As my meal ends, Pierangelini disappears into the kitchen and returns a few minutes later with a plate in his hand. “It’s licorice ice cream with a beet purée, that’s all,” he says as he sets it down in front of me. There are a few slivers of white truffle on top of the ice cream. “This is not dessert,” he assures me. “You take licorice, beets, and three slices of truffle, and you have the earth.” Nothing could persuade me to sample this outlandish creation—nothing except all the stunningly good food I’ve already had at Gambero Rosso. I take a spoonful of all three elements together. The vermilion sweetness of the beets softens the metallic charcoal tang of the licorice; the truffle smooths out the edges. I actually like it—a lot—and eat it all.
The truffles that have figured so lavishly in my meals, he tells me as I finish my very last scrap of one, are not from Piedmont, but from Tuscany, mostly from around Volterra, near San Gimignano. “Many truffles now are doctored with gas to make them more fragrant,” he says. “These are harvested by a friend.” I mention white truffle oil. “Chemicals!” he exclaims. “I detest truffle oil!” I tell him that in America it is a common ingredient today, used even by some of the most famous chefs. He snorts. “The next time you come,” he says, “we’ll talk about the culture of chefs.”
I can’t wait.
Gambero Rosso Piazza della Vittoria 13, San Vincenzo (Livorno) (0565-70-10-21)
Tuscany à la Ducasse
I’m not sure that Trattoria Toscana (Tenuta La Badiola—Località Badiola, Castiglione della Pescaia [Grosseto]; 0564-94-48-00; andana.it.), the freestanding dining complex on the grounds of L’Andana, Alain Ducasse’s elegant resort hotel in Castiglione della Pescaia, in Tuscany’s Maremma region, qualifies as a trattoria. In décor and pace of service, and in its notable absence of hustle and bustle, it seems more purely a ristorante—slightly more serious—and anyway, the chef, Christophe Martin, is French.
That said, it is a warm, attractive place, with pale rose marble and terra-cotta floors, squared-off brick columns, pinkish walls, and pots of herbs sharing space with elegant glassware on the tables, and the food is solid, imaginative, and (mostly) convincingly Italian.
A spectacular tagliere (platter) di cinta senese offers seven or eight kinds of charcuterie based on the famous local pig breed of that name, including fennel-seeded finocchiona in two sizes, prosciutto from Arezzo, two different “tartares” of raw sausage meat, and, best of all, some curls of subtly herb-scented tarese, like lardo but with some pale meat attached. Pennette are tossed with ribbons of cuttlefish and bottarga from both tuna and mullet in a sauce of cuttlefish ink—powerful and satisfying. A dish of octopus, baby mussels, and sausage in red-wine sauce, topped with little diamonds of fried chickpea flour, improbably delicate—like a pommes soufflées version of panisses—suggests a slightly more rustic take on something Franck Cerutti might serve at Ducasse’s Le Louis XV, in Monaco (where Martin once worked). Meat figures prominently among the main courses, including rabbit from the estate with thyme and porcini, braciole of milk-fed veal, also raised here, and a memorable roasted tagliata—sliced T-bone—of Maremma beef.
The wine list isn’t huge, but it has many fine selections, including Maremma Tuscans both super and just plain good (like a cherry-bright Sassotondo San Lorenzo 2001, 100 percent Ciliegiolo), and three wines from the resort’s handsomely manicured property, under the Tenuta La Badiola label: a rosato made from Alicante grapes and two whites—a lively, tasty unoaked 100-percent Vermentino and a surprising and successful blend of Viognier (80 percent) and Vermentino.