Daniel Metcalfe

In the Alpine region of Tyrol, there’s a saying – “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are” – which dates back to the days when feuding barons savoured speck and dumplings, leaving their peasantry to chew on rough Schüttelbrot (crispbread).

Times have changed. South Tyrol, the predominantly German-speaking region of northern Italy, is now one of the continent’s prime fine dining spots. It boasts 18 Michelin stars, more than any other Italian province. By way of comparison, the Los Angeles area, with a population 15 times greater, can manage only 24.

Tyrol formed the Alpine flank of the Habsburg empire until 1918, when Italy annexed its southern half. It was renamed Alto Adige, raised to “autonomous region” level, and its capital, Bolzano, given a robustly Italo-Fascist makeover. It is here in Südtirol – as the German-speaking locals still call it – that the food really sparkles, a region that combines an Alpine love of starch (watch out for Knödeln, or dumplings) with the fruit strudels of the Viennese drawing room, and all the spices of the local Lagrein and Gewürtztraminer grapes.

South Tyroleans are serious about cheese too. My first stop was at one of the region’s leading lights, Degust, a small independent cheese affinatore in the village of Varna in Val d’Isarco. Since 1995, Edith and Hansi Baumgartner have been working out of a Mussolini-era bunker that provides perfect refining conditions, often adding figs, cherries, and even seaweed for flavour.

Edith appeared, half-obscured by ribboned boxes of cheeses with blueberry chutney and mandarin mustard. “South Tyrol has wonderful cows and milk but the cheese was a disaster, so we started this micro-refinery. There was really nothing else around,” she explained, once I was happily nibbling on some Gruyère with a glass of dark muscatel. Edith handed me one of her favourites, a bittersweet blue cheese called Golden Gel, made at an altitude of 1,800m. “It was matured for six months in the bunker,” she confided, “another month in basins of sweet grapes, and then wrapped in hay for a further month.”

Edith’s brother-in-law Karl Baumgartner is head chef at the Michelin-starred Schöneck restaurant and shares her almost obsessive passion for quality ingredients. Winding up to the tiny village of Falzes, I passed lonely hayricks that stood on snow-covered meadows, before finally reaching Schöneck. It was more than worth the drive. After a round of delectable starters – steak tartare with white truffle shavings and some succulent gnocchi, I had capretto (milk-fed goat) and winter vegetables in a herb sauce, with a punchy Pinot Nero Burgum Novum Castelfeder 2006. Then Baumgartner arrived with a glint in his eye and an oozy chocolate tart with a shapely clod of beige ice-cream. It slipped down like a dream before I felt a sudden kick in the larynx. “You like it?” beamed the chef, before revealing that it was derived from vanilla-flavoured pipe tobacco.

Fine dining was all very well but I still wanted to know what constituted Tyrolean home cooking. And what about the speakers of Ladin, a minority language not so different from Swiss Romansh, spoken by 40,000 in the Gherdëina and Badia valleys of the south-east of the region? What did they eat? Refreshed by Baumgartner’s mountain flowers herbal tea, I headed to the skiing heartland of Badia to find out.

In the winding mountain roads outside Pedraces, a modest wooden farmhouse finally appeared from the darkness. With no English-speaking staff, and a fixed-course menu written entirely in Ladin, the family-run Maso Runch makes few overtures to its customers. I was surprised to discover that it is, however, one of the region’s most popular restaurants, often booked for weeks in advance. It was as homely as it got: waitresses in faux-peasant outfits swished around with spinach Knödeln, great pink sides of pork, bowls full of juniper-flavoured sauerkraut, and carafes of Lagrein – a dark local red – all served in such a hurry there was no time for a humble Ladin bun apetit. The food was hearty and delicious.

Restored by the Hotel Fanes spa in the nearby mountain village of San Cassiano, I prepared for my fourth and final sample of Tyrolean cuisine. This was at the upmarket Rosa Alpina hotel, frequented by the likes of George Clooney and Prince Albert of Monaco, and home to St Hubertus, a double Michelin-starred restaurant run by renowned chef Norbert Niederkofler.

St Hubertus is the Mont Blanc of South Tyrolean fine dining, though eating there sometimes feels like scaling the mountain. Settled behind a starched tablecloth in a wood panelled dining room, I paced myself through course after wine-paired course (not to mention several amuse-bouches), all twiddled, twisted and twined to perfection. Each offering dazzled, arriving like the perfect little present you’d always wanted but never thought to ask for: pork belly with smoked potato purée, Kaluga Amur caviar and champagne sauce; buckwheat ravioli of buffalo milk ricotta with squid and cream of green beans. My head swam, my taste buds danced.

But by the time the chocolate millefeuille arrived eight courses later, the sommelier ever present, the maître-d’ always watchful, and everything so relentlessly excellent, I wished for a brief moment that I was back in the Maso Runch being largely ignored. Ah well, perhaps that old proverb was right …

Daniel Metcalfe’s ‘Out of Steppe: The Lost Peoples of Central Asia’ (Arrow) has been shortlisted for this year’s Dolman travel book of the year

see also livinginitaly.com

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