The distance from farm to table in Italy’s restaurants can usually be measured by a few kilometers. The ingredients have even more integrity when the restaurant has its own organic orto or garden. Silician born Salvatore Denaro has made his home in Umbria, where he is the chef/owner of Foligno’s Il Bacco Felice osteria. A visit to Salvatore’s is always a memorable experience – he and his kitchen have long been recognized by epicures, and his fame is spreading as national publications (recently in Food & Wine magazine) have taken notice. Salvatore has been inviting us to join him in his garden for quite some time, and when we left Bacco Friday evening (see photo of the week for what that looked like!), we decided to take him up on it the next morning.
He is in his garden everyday at 5:00am – we arrived around 11:00, and found him still laboring over his tomatoes. He stopped everything to take us from plant to plant, “harvesting” – eating and sharing ripe fruits and vegetables along the way. He explained details of his experiments with different seeds, different types of soil, placement with respect to the sun, cycle of the moon, etc.
My favorite nibble was the lemon cucumber – quite tasty. After a bite of cucumber, Salvatore spat the seeds out onto a strategic spot and told us that the cukes would now start growing in that spot. We then met his two pet black pigs, living out a lovely porcine retirement featuring heavy portions of leftovers from the restaurant.
Then as we made our way to sit in the shade on some bales of hay, Salvatore appeared with a cooler of sparkling wine, heavenly mozzarella di bufula (one of our group went off to pluck some of Salvatore’s basil for the repast), a very rustic pork salami, specially baked whole grain bread. Salvatore also had a bottle of wine on hand, but no cork screw.
In true Salvatore style, he then walked out to the country road that passes his garden and flagged down a couple of neighbors driving by to see if they happened to have a corkscrew on hand. Still smarting from our wine consumption at Bacco Felice the night before, we convinced Salvatore that the crisp methode classico was really quite enough.
