La Porta

Thus far we’ve been kind regarding the mention of food and our time here in Italy. That has required restraint on our part since the food here is always good at least and normally food is excellent. Food in the markets is very fresh and mature. Tomatoes taste like (gasp!) tomatoes. Cucumbers that thin, bumpy, and crisp. Prepared food offered for snacking is very good, from pastries with cappuccino in the morning to panini or gelato in the afternoon. And restaurants, trattorias, osterias, whatever places to sit and have a meal are called, almost all such places are good or better than good.

We had a meal today in a excellent restaurant, our favorite restaurant, the Osteria La Porta in the tiny medieval town of Monticchiello, a town of 300 souls a few miles to the west of Montepulciano. There is no shortage of very good places to eat around here but La Porta is a jewel.

It was a pleasant day and we sat outside on the terrace with a view of the cypress lined roads in the valley of the Orcia River below. The air was a little cool but the sun blazed down from a nearly clear sky. Daria Cappelli, the owner and host, gave us menus and told us what were the specials for the day. We ordered sparkling water and a bottle of 2007 Luna d’Oro Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, a wine produced by her twin brother, Dario. It is a big wine but a wine that is easy to appreciate (and, sadly, is not sold in the USA.)

For an appetizer we split an artichoke dish pictured below. (Our enthusiasm got the better of us and we dove into it before we took the picture.) On the bottom was a gob of puréed artichoke with a patty of artichoke sformato placed on top. A thin cross-section of whole artichoke was placed on top of that and the whole thing was covered in a mild pecorino cheese sauce with a sprinkling of saffron threads.

The artichoke appetizer was so good that we decided to take pictures of the rest of the meal. 

Annette started with chickpea and bean soup with croutons which arrived in an bowl one would ordinarily use for food storage. Interesting presentation and a delicious soup.

Michael started with pici (thick, hand rolled cylinders of pasta) with a sauce of three different meats. The flavor in the sauce that rang through was the capon, a chickeny flavor but more intense, more robust.

Both first courses were servings of a modest size.

Annette continued with tagliata di manzo, thin slices of grilled steak, covered with very, very thin slices of lardo di Colonnata. (Sounds awful, doesn’t it. It tasted great!) The interplay between the lean, tender beef and the little bits of fatty, salty, seasoned lardo was delicious. Annette found a jumbled pile of artichokes chunks on her plate as well.

Michael continued with peposo, a Tuscan standby, a beef stew done in red wine and flavored with black pepper. The version here was less peppery than others and nicely flavored in ways I wish I could reproduce. The beef stew was accompanied with buttery mashed potatoes.

Recently I’ve been interested in sformati, vegetable based dishes which are similar in some ways to flans or, perhaps, quiches. The Italian version is a chopped up vegetable held together either with a matrix of potato or with a matrix of egg and bechamel. Annette and I split a rapini sformato that was showered in shaved mild pecorino cheese.

Again, the amounts were relatively modest. At the end of the meal we were not so interested in desert but we weren’t disabled by having consumed too much. We were very comfortable. Lunch, however, took two hours. (We remember our work years when lunch involved less time and much more agita. We’re balancing that out now.)

We finished with café and a look at the dessert menu which included some sweet wines which we didn’t try but we were interested in the idea of “Wines for dessert and meditation”. Next time we’ll try one.

Hello to Susan, Laura and Tom, Peter and Anne, Rory and Kathy. We were thinking of you and wishing you were here with us this afternoon. And we wish the same of everyone else who might read this and who hasn't been to La Porta. It would be a good group and a lot of fun!