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Italy’s top chef Fulvio Pierangelini comes to Geneva’s Richemond

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Sapori restaurant offer: tasting menu, CHF89, not including wine, April 22-May 6, 2009

The Richemond hotel’s young but highly talented chef Pietro Amato will be hosting chefs from different regions of Italy over the next few months in the Sapori Ristorante. He kicked off  the first series yesterday with none other than Italy’s top chef, Fulvio Pierangelini, chef and owner of the famous Gambero Rosso in San Vincenzo near Livorno in Tuscany.

Pierangelini designed the menu and helped Amato’s highly capable staff get all his tricks down pat.

Pierangelini’s cuisine is a perfect example of what good Italian tastes are all about: simple (or at least seemingly so), yet with a perfect balance of top-quality ingredients.

Yesterday’s menu sounded classic enough: creamed white beans, king prawns and extra virgin olive oil; pappa al pomodoro, a traditional Tuscan soup made of dry bread and tomatoes and flavored with basil and olive oil; thinly sliced Florentine T-bone, perfectly seized so that it maintained all its natural juices; Tuscan sausage and cheese, brought in especially for the event; and Ricciarelli almond paste cookies laced with orange, an icy fruit-flavored granité, topped off with a Cantucci anise-flavored almond biscotto for “dunking” in the accompanying glass of Vin Santo dessert wine.

It’s Pierangelini’s twists of hand, like putting the basil in and taking it out at various stages in the cooking, that make it a pappa like no other.

The cheese course

This tasting menu is available for CHF89, not including wine, and this particular one is on offer from April 22 to May 6, so make your reservations now. It’s an amazing deal in a delightful setting offering top-notch, Italian-style service. Take a look at their à la carte menu under dining on Le Richemond’s site.

A wide selection of the best Italian wines, including Alessandro Mori’s Brunello di Montalcino Madonna delle Grazie 2004 and 2000, a 100 % Sangiovese wine as earthy yet elegant as its producer, Alessandro Mori, and certainly not the most expensive on the menu, but highly expressive of both the maker and the region.

Ruffino surprised us with a new wine that doesn’t even have a label yet. It is a fine blend of Italian varietal grapes and will be called by the reaction the makers had when they tasted their final creation:  Italian for “Wow”! Needless to say, it was good, and worthy of its name.

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