Classically styled and strongly customer-oriented cuisine in a casual luxury setting: the perfect alchemy of dining room and dishes at Enoteca La Torre.
THE STORY
A beautiful friendship, professional expertise, catering and entrepreneurial skills, passion and foresight. It winds through these aspects the story of Enoteca La Torre, which was born in Viterbo thanks to Roberto Pepponi, then Michele, his son, and Silvia Sperduti, Michele's wife and a great expert in events and catering. The friendship is that between Kotaro Noda and Luigi Picca, chef and restaurant manager of the fledgling restaurant, who met at the Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence and whose job it is to steer its course. They do it excellently, since in the 2008 Gambero Rosso guide, not even a year after opening, Enoteca La Torre di Viterbo is among the best 15 restaurants in Lazio, while in 2010 a Michelin star was awarded. From 2011 onward many changes, starting with the most sensational one, the sudden divorce of the Japanese chef, the first in Europe to be awarded a Michelin star, who leaves the reins to Danilo Ciavattini, a student of Salvatore Tassa and formerly chef at Pipero in Albano Laziale.
2013 brought the relocation of the gourmet restaurant to Villa Laetitia, the Roman residence of fashion designer Anna Fendi Venturini, already a client of the Viterbo restaurant for some catering and eager to equip her luxurious Roman boutique hotel with a suitable restaurant. In the same year, the team headed by Luigi Picca was joined by sommelier Rudy Travagli, from Romagna, also with a past at Pinchiorri and at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck. In 2016 another turnover at the stove, filling the vacancy left by Danilo Ciavattini comes 27-year-old Domenico Stile from Campania, forged by relevant experiences with Cannavacciuolo, Bottura, Vissani and Nino Di Costanzo, as well as at Alinea in Chicago, ready to take on the responsibility of directing the new course. In 2019 Luigi Picca also leaves and Rudy Travagli takes his place as restaurant manager. In 2022 the second Michelin star arrives, rewarding the achievement of a solidity long pursued and now more concrete than ever.
THE RESTAURANT
A solemn, institutional and beautiful place inside a villa designed in the early 1900s by Roman architect Armando Brasini, combining Renaissance elements and Baroque style, such as that of the columns, chandeliers and stucco on the walls. The large stained-glass window that dominates the dining room is made in Art Nouveau style and provides a backdrop for an elegant, refined and luxurious environment like few others, gives splendid light during the day and borders the beautiful surrounding garden. On the ground floor there are also other spaces, such as the tea room and the bar, ideal for having a cocktail before dinner or eating something simpler, such as club sandwiches, mozzarella in carrozza with caper sauce and rigatoni cacio e pepe: “I realize that such a location can be awe-inspiring, which is why we chose a casual luxury approach, which does not include the imposition of any dress code, so as to lighten the experience and put the customer more at ease, ” explains Rudy Travagli.
Domenico Stile's cuisine is framed in this context, curated and rigorous, as the classic dictates of the French school impose, but also modern, thanks to the use of cocktails and distillates in the form of essences and the strong link with his Neapolitan roots that break the mould, entertain and characterize. This synthesis generates proposals that are transversal, direct and rich in taste, the result of long and complex processing performed with great commitment and passion, without ever a smudge: “The conquest of the second Michelin star has not changed my idea of cooking, if anything it has strengthened the conviction that fashions pass, but not the classics, ”, says the chef. Also noteworthy is the aesthetic component in Stile's dishes, which perfectly harmonizes form and substance: “Domenico has been very good, from 2016 to today he has greatly improved this aspect, making his dishes more and more beautiful and adherent to the environment,” admits Travagli . The gastronomic proposal includes three different tasting menus: 3 courses of the customer's choice at 180 euros, “A Journey with Eyes Closed,” or 6 surprise courses at 200 euros, and finally “On the Move,” an 8-course tasting course of the chef's choice at 220 euros.
"For the kitchen, serving a tasting menu is easier; everything is already decided. The choice of dishes to be offered almost always falls on the more classic ones, since about 80 percent of our clientele is foreign and some flavors that are too intense may not be liked. We must never forget that we cook for guests and the offer must always be calibrated to the demand,", says the chef. However, the restaurant relies heavily on the a la carte menu, the most immediate way to build customer loyalty: "Doing catering also means making ends meet, and you can do that with events, consultations, but the best way is to push patrons to come back again and again. If we offered only tasting menus, all those professionals and entrepreneurs who today even come to eat just one dish would come to have an experience once or twice a year, not more," the restaurant manager points out.
Basically, it would be enough to maintain this approach and these standards to keep everything going for the best, however, constant thought is given to the aspects that need to be improved or changed in order to aspire to new recognitions and goals. The first goal is to implement service in order to create greater synergy between the dining room, kitchen and customer: “We want more and more dishes to be prepared or finished in the dining room in front of the guests, as we do with the baba, one of the chef's signature dishes, because people really like to see the process that leads to the making of the dish”. This will be possible thanks to a team that, after a few difficulties, can now be said to be close-knit, broken-in and tested, built around Rudy Travagli himself and maître Alessandro Nocera, key figures in offering impeccable service that is never meddlesome, scrupulous without being intrusive, elegant and formal, without ever blurring into mannerism.
There will be no shortage of novelties in terms of the menu either, as there are plans to dedicate a special track to the chef's historical dishes. "I would like this place to look more and more like the iconic Italian three-Michelin-starred restaurants, I'm thinking of Da Vittorio and Santini above all, places of the heart where the certainty of eating well is combined with the warmth of a family environment and the embrace of an extraordinary welcome, capable of making the overall experience unforgettable, ” Rudy Travagli concludes.
THE DISHES
The amuse bouche are the exact prelude to what will be the experience at the table, they summarize with great consistency the style and approach of the chef from Campania. Examples are the red turnip raviolo with tartare of the same and lime mayonnaise, the pizzetta alla marinara with tomato sauce, black olives and anchovies, and the sphere stuffed with buffalo ricotta cheese, covered with Aperol Spritz gel and peanuts, passing through the casatiello and the classic Neapolitan taralli with pepper and sugna, lightened over the years so as not to compromise the meal. The course begins with “Shrimp, sea and land lettuce, pears”: the shellfish are marinated with oil, salt, lime and vodka, at the base a green sauce made with fermented lettuce, cucumber and pear puree and a pink sauce made with soy-marinated yolk, seaweed, caviar and lettuce powder, a very pleasant dish that returns contrasting flavors, freshness, acidity, but also fatness and savoriness.
This is followed by the “Mullet di scoglio alla livornese, Blue Label and pineapple, ” stuffed with mullet itself, black olives and tomato, flavored with mousse and essence of Johnny Walker's Blue Label and cubes of pineapple to give freshness to a mouthwatering dish revisited in an international key, yet without denying its origins and deliciousness. The "risotto with lemons, cannolicchi, veracious clams, asparagus and yogurt ” is another signature dish of the chef's, with lemon worked in eight different ways; at the base veracious clams and their emulsion, cannolicchi, yogurt and asparagus to give crunchiness. A dish that speaks of the South, of sea and iodine, of contrasts between land and sea, between savoriness and acidity.
However, what follows is the true manifesto of Domenico Stile's cuisine, as well as a hymn to his land, namely the “Rabbit ravioli all'ischitana, piperna, peperone crusco and tabaccone,” a white pasta stuffed with rabbit, at the base an Ischian tomato sauce flavored with garlic and black squid reduction, to which are added barbecued black olives, crusco pepper ketchup and chopped squid: a dish that is elegant and refined in execution, yet assertive and bold, a lash of flavor that tells of the most popular, true and authentic South.
It continues with an unmissable off program: “Quail egg, buffalo taleggio cheese and crispy trombette dei morti”, at the base mixed mushroom ragu and white truffle to complete a great classic, revised and enriched. The last savory dish is the “Guinea fowl in crepinette, red vermouth, plums and cocoa, ” portioned directly to the table: the guinea fowl is marinated in vermouth and then cooked perfectly in crepinette, served with cocoa and red vermouth chutney and sweet and sour plum chop, perhaps too much. Alongside is a croquette stuffed with guinea fowl liver and a buckwheat flour tartlet filled with guinea fowl leg stew and vermouth gel, stock and herb oil.
It concludes with the famous baba, finished and plated directly at the table, and a chocolate cake, in which we find all that complexity of the chef's cooking mentioned earlier and which represents the common thread of the entire experience: it is an extreme of the Setteveli cake with ten layers of chocolate, in different consistencies and percentages of cocoa, from milk to 82 percent dark. Accompanying the cake is a mousse of mucilage, or the outer part of the cocoa bean, with a flavor that is both sweet and sour at the same time, which complements the taste by softening its fatty notes. The infusion served at the end is made with cocoa bean, chili pepper, star anise and cinnamon and leaves a pleasant sense of freshness: “this was considered the drink of the gods, according to the ancient Mayans,” the chef explains.
The cellar boasts over a thousand labels, ranging from the great champagnes, vintage and otherwise, to the most representative bubbles of Franciacorta and the rest of Italy. Lots of reds, especially Piedmont, divided by production areas, and Tuscany, divided by provinces, with lots of depth and different verticals, but also Lazio with the most representative labels, then lots of France and finally Switzerland, Spain, Slovenia and Albania. The classic wine pairing is replaced by evocative Wine Tours, careful selections of labels that tell the story of a particular area, including Italy, Europe, Champagne and Diamond, the most prestigious, encompassing a synthesis of the world's best wine zones. Prices for 3 glasses of wine range from 175 euros to 750 if you choose the Diamond Wine Tour, while for 5 glasses you can spend from 200 up to 1550. "I don't like to pair a wine with every dish, because the average customer struggles ‘-Rudy Travagli explains- ’Wine Tours, on the other hand, are designed to be an accompaniment to the meal, not a true pairing. They are modular and, unlike choosing a bottle from the list, give me the opportunity to interact more with guests and express myself better."
Address
Restaurant Enoteca La Torre Villa Laetitia
Lungotevere delle Armi, 22 - Rome
Phone +39 06 45668304
