Via Stella 22, Modena, Italy www.osteriafrancescana.it
Luciano Pavarotti and Enzo Ferrari didn’t have a huge amount in common, but they did share a birthplace: Modena, a prosperous Italian town about 90 miles north of Florence. Although the tenor and the car manufacturer are Modena’s most famous sons, the town is better known in culinary circles for its production of the finest balsamic vinegars money can buy (and, boy, you can spend a lot on vinegar here). Over the last few years, though, Modena has become known to foodies around the world for another reason – Massimo Bottura’s restaurant Osteria Francescana, currently ranked third best in the world.
And what a dinner. Opting for the eight-course tasting menu entitled’Classics’ we are treated to dish after dish of outstanding food. There were tiny freshwater fish entombed in a thin disc of tempura and served with a capione ice cream of truly immense flavour; salt cod fillet cooked sous-vide and surrounded by a tomato and olive broth so fragrant you could smell it coming ten feet away; beautifully delicate saba-coated eel with cream of polenta, apple jelly and burnt onion powder; and playful desserts such as the foie gras crunch lolly – hazelnut-coated terrine with a balsamic vinegar jelly running through the middle. Even the breadsticks were the best you’d ever tasted.
‘At the base there is a Crème Royale which I learnt from Alain Ducasse and at the top there is air of rosemary which I picked up from Ferran Adria’, he tells us. These two elements sandwich the emotional part of the dish, a compression of Parmesan and beans that reminds Bottura of his grandmother. With a grin, he concludes:’So we have Ducasse at the bottom, Adria at the top, and my grandmother in the middle’, before moving to greet another table and allowing me my first bite, which I’m certain tastes even better now.
Osteria Francescana clearly isn’t somewhere you would eat everyday; it’s a magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime experience of sublime cooking from a truly special chef. A rare treat.
Photos Paolo Terz