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Image 1: www.donalfonso.com Chef: Alfonso Iaccarino
Image 2: Tasting menu (8-course): €155 Traditional menu (6-course): €130
À la carte: First course about €30; Second course about €40
Closed on Monday and Tuesday. Open only from mid-April to end-Oct.
Image 3: A colourful dining room dominated by pink. The team here is friendly and fluent in English. They even provided a small stool for lady’s handbag.
Image 4: Each table has an arrangement of corn and cherry tomato as decoration. We were then given a booklet about history of this house and the restaurant. Our meal started off with a refreshing cocktail.
Image 5: A little surprise to start the meal - A chickpea purée with celery sticks from their organic farm.
Image 7: Another amuse bouche, spinach and cottage pie with sweet and sour sauce.
Image 8: The first course from the tasting was seafood - a triangular octopus ink jelly resting on a Cannelloni bean purée with diced octopus salad hidden underneath, topped by clams and fried chervil. Good flavour and great texture from the shellfish.
Image 9: A beautiful painting of Pumpkin Three-Way: crisp, purée, and jelly! Decorated with pork sausage, pistachio cream and mozzarella cream. I loved the mix of textures here!
Image 10: Not only is the dining room here very colourful, so does every dish! Perfectly sautéed langoustine enclosed by tomato gazpacho and garnished with a crispy fried basil leaf. An innovative soup course.
Image 11: Large tube pasta, Paccheri, with blue-fin tuna in a green pepper and oregano sauce, topped by a deseeded green chilli. A very original mild pasta sauce, not spicy at all. Needless to say the pasta was cooked al dente.
Image 12: Covered in a nest of fried leeks was a beautifully cooked Pezzogna, a freshwater fish in the bream family, accompanied by a well-matched tomato sauce and a touch of lemon confit. I enjoyed every course so far.
Image 13: The meat course wasn't weak at all. A tender piece of veal stuffed with mozzarella came with an amazing elastic-cheesy potato and sage purée served in a delicate “crispy potato cup”.
Image 14: For cheese, a selection of local cheese accompanied by fresh slices of apple, honey with honeycomb, and almond.
Image 15: The cheese came with a small salad.
Image 16: A small pre-dessert of mini fruit tart containing fig, blackberry, and redcurrant topped with a honey sorbet.
Image 17: Wow, a cool lemon dessert. Lemon cream in a lemon cup garnished with a slice of caramelized lemon and a puffy fried dough dusted with icing sugar. The combination of the warm pastry with lemon cream was superb!
Image 18: And our final dessert, an adorable biscuit cup of coffee cream with many biscuit spoons!
Image 19: And of course, a set of petits-fours for tea.
Image 20: After the meal, Livia showed us a video of Alfonso's farm where all of their vegetables are grown. They also have a wide range of pasta and olive oil for sale.
Image 21:
The library and lounge area
Image 22: Our lovely lunch concluded with a visit to the underground tunnel of an ancient Roman cave. It is now used as a cheese aging room and wine cellar.
Image 23: It contains more than 25,000 bottles.
Image 24: This is the patio area for hotel and restaurant guests. Overall, it was a great lunch and when I am back next time, I will definitely stay a night in this hotel to better enjoy the landscape of this scenic area.
