“From the lush landscapes to the faultless food, you'll never be short of things to do - or eat - on an Italian escape,” says tour guide Lorne Blyth.
22.03.2024 - 14:21 / forbes.com
Chef Norbert Niederkofler is perhaps the only chef in Italy who doesn’t cook with olive oil or lemon. His “local and seasonal” mindset goes far beyond the usual culinary mantra, and those staples don’t exist in his homeland. Northern and mountainous, Italy’s Dolomite mountains have more in common with Austria than Rome.
And so, the chef has gone all-in on his Cook the Mountain philosophy—in 2020, he published a beautiful book of the same name—working with only what can be found in his immediate surroundings and, increasingly, using techniques that would have been more at home in a grandmother’s house a century ago than in a Michelin kitchen a decade ago. He held to it and honed it as his restaurant, St. Hubertus in the Rosa Alpina (now an Aman hotel) in Alta Badia, ascended the culinary recognition ladder.
He remembers the realization that his international clients were accustomed to finding the best of haute cuisine everywhere. He wanted instead to offer something they could find only in South Tyrol. Later on, he remembers the powers that be warning him that his relentlessly local, ancestral approach “didn’t seem very Michelin.”
He ignored them. St. Hubertus earned its third Michelin star in 2017.
The restaurant held it (along with an increasingly important green one) until his departure last year, when the restaurant closed for a renovation and a sort of Kismet opportunity landed him in his lap. The beautiful old villa next to his home in Brunico—a place he had looked at for years—came onto the market.
Within six months of opening last summer, his new Atelier Moessmer was awarded three more Michelin stars.
Along with this unusually quick recognition, it also pulled in another green one. This means quite a lot to Niederkofler, who brands himself as the Ethical Chef, created a university degree program in mountain enogastronomic sciences, and organizes an international symposium dedicated to ethical and sustainable cooking.
Villa Moessmer, which dates from 1890, became a perfect venue for a fully freestanding expression of Niederkofler’s gastronomic vision. Because the house was heavily protected—the windows, the ceilings, even the scratches on the floor, says restaurant manager and head sommelier Lukas Gerges—they got permission to build a separate kitchen in a glass cube that’s an extension of the villa.
It's a visual nod to the restaurant’s combination of history and modernity. The house was once the residence of the owner of the Moessmer textile company, the region’s oldest producer of loden fabric and a collaborator with haute couture brands. In recent years, the company allowed South Tyrolean writer Joseph Zoderer to work there. He wrote a book longhand and hung pages on the walls.
“We didn’t
“From the lush landscapes to the faultless food, you'll never be short of things to do - or eat - on an Italian escape,” says tour guide Lorne Blyth.
If you are looking for a unique take on a luxurious dining experience in New York City, plan a visit to Fasano. This restaurant is led by fourth generation restauranter, Gero Fasano and combines amazing Italian cuisine with outstanding service. In the tradition of great family-owned establishments, you can expect a very warm welcome and exceptional attention to detail. Fasano features Northern Italian specialties developed by Chef Nicola Fedeli as well as a terrific wine list curated by sommelier Manoel Beato.
When winter’s chill was thawed by the blossoming of spring, our family would set off for the long drive from the Oxfordshire downs to our holiday house in Le Marche, central Italy. Cruising through the arable heartlands of Europe, my heart would skip a beat as we neared the totemic slate gradients of the Italian Alps. Snaking over the Brenner Pass, it felt like being spirited to another world: a sky-bright Narnia, as we emerged blinking-eyed into the Dolomites sun on the other side. Stopping in simple, family-run hotels for the night, the breakfasts were a joyful, modest but perfectly formed ode to the Sud Tyrol locale—the creamiest Sterzinger yogurts that we savored with crimson forest-fresh lingonberries, flower-flecked cheese (for breakfast!) draped with silky threads of marjoram honey from their farm. Today, most hip restaurants are ingredient-led, but these these mountain families have been doing it for centuries.
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“I just can’t do a lot of stairs.”
Hotel Chalet Mirabell is one of those places that has you at hello. It’s a short drive up the hill from the Dolomite mountain town of Merano, but the sanctum of the lobby is a world of its own. And the view that greets you—dazzling.