It is a hundred-year-old palace hotel at the corner of Lake Garda’s smile. However, it is refreshed. Recently it has been renovated and fancy infrastructure has been added, as well as heated swimming pools with mountains view, infinite balconies / restaurants and other pleasant peculiarities.

As it should be, there is a “bistro” and “a first class restaurant”.

We shall discuss the second one.

Everything is as it should be. There is a ceremonial verandah overlooking sunset mountains. People are in eveningwear. There is a maître at the entrance. The menu is short and glossy. In other words, a usual hotel luxury-restaurant «for dinners».  But!

Further, it begins to be surprising.

All, absolutely all positions we took, were actually perfect.

Lobster carpaccio. And how can you more fuck around with it? But, indeed, you can!

When it comes to lobster meat pieces, temperature can vary. It should be crude, barely warm in order to be perfectly combined with sauce. The texture might vary as well, but should be elastic. The same is true regarding the above lettuce leaves.

Farther on, more!  Ravioli are with a very broad pipe, al dente, with ragout.

Then, comes something that is usually unnoticeable and has a “fuck off” status on any menu, just for vegetable eaters. Wildly delicious quinoa towers on a pillow of super tomatoes with grilled porcini on top.

And a real «dish-to-return», risotto with asparagus and crude langoustines. A headshot.

This muddy, green brew just blows up in the mouth, bitch. Really, blows up in the mouth.

And then it still remains on the receptors for a really long time.

Well, and the pigeon. With a fake leg stuffed with its liver, strudel and sweet Jerusalem artichoke.

11 points out of 10!

The same story with each item in this short menu.

Oh yeah, their five dish set is only €75. It is more that sympathetic for such a festival.

I’ll be back!

A house and roses. A small river. Burned grass. Cows. Meantime, the peacocks are walking around.

It seems like there is nothing to do here. However …

It is getting dark, “respected people” are gathering in the glass pavilion, which is covered with nickel silver and candles. Obviously, they have come up to this remote and simple place with one and only purpose—to devour. Intentionally.

Kind of a scanty menu. Ok, it is cool, there are 5 types of ham in the testing endowed with Krug super champagne. But you’re still waiting for a gank.

And it is absent.

It is absent.

EVERYTHING IS PERFECT. We gobbled up 17 plates between the three of us, having caused shock at the fancy tables for 6-8 people.

PERFECT! Flawless, absolutely flawless.

There was only one faded item, poached egg with black caviar. But I have my explanation for this. I think that people idolize caviar so much, that when it appears on a plate, they forget about everything else. Black caviar is self-sufficient … but even this item was «simply good», not fucking good though. Nevertheless, it definitely was not a failure.

The rest?

Everything, from the first piece of lard on bread up to cherry comfiture whose each note you can feel. It is cherry, bitch, nothing to do with sugar. You do feel each micro nuance of this berry, each summer flash imprinted on it while it was ripening.

Of course, culatello. Forget about all the ham you have eaten before. Just get it out of your head. All that was nothing.

This one here is fucking Rolls-Royce in the world of dried meat.  Taste, texture, in general, everything here is beyond comparison.

The foam of taste in the mouth is engrossing. It is absorbing you and your vis-a-vis into the unfaithful light of night candles, into smells and tastes, into fireflies’ flashes, into grass burnt under the sun, into fist size stars.

Oh yeah, and the cheese. Fucking awesome.

-Are you sure, you wanna go there? The area isn’t beautiful.

-We’re looking for the food, not for the area!

“Not beautiful!” Ha-ha. You haven’t been to Medvedkovo, baby!

Honestly, I have to admit that the glass pizzeria with infernal crowd at the entrance (which sang along “The Griby” coming from our red cabrio) wasn’t getting us into the mood for dinner.

— Seafood?

We were stubbing pictures from the phone into their faces.

They smiled at us and nodded, but we couldn’t believe it. The menu was in Italian and our modest knowledge wouldn’t let us distinguish more than “con Frutti di Mare”. But no way we could correlate the most expensive dish here — €15 with the seafood. It was impossible.

GUYS, 16, SIXTEEN.

A Euro more, €16, for a plate of grillato. €14 – fritto. €12 – half lobster with tomato paste.

The food was frozen. Scampi. Cuttlefish. Shrimps. And even bitchy porcini! With gamberini for €7.

Fuck the prices. It seems to me we’re not poor.

Everything’s well prepared and it is indeed delicious!

Fucking, delicious!

And check out the neighborhood spécialité: calcione. Under the pan, there’s literally a full pot of tomato soup with shrimps/mussels/angler and even with a couple of scami (€12).

It was awesome to see old ladies and children around. Some very understandable people who share pasta/pizza. They open crabs with their hands because they can easily afford it.

At the age of 65 and more, retired and on usual pension.

“Actually, if you want some normal food at a normal price, you should leave such places as Milano and Venice and come to the non-touristy towns. For instance, here!» gushes our friend Gabovich, who left for red Bologna a year ago.

Talking like that, we landed at the end of a queue, which reminded me of line to Lenin’s mausoleum in the shaggy ‘70s. What is that supposed to mean?

«An ice cream parlor. The best on earth!» Lera says categorically.

It was raining outside. It was about 15°C  at the most. And people were standing in line FOR ICE CREAM?! In Italy where it is sold by nearly everyone with the exception of the shoe shiners. WTF???

15 minutes later, we entered the shop. As always there were two tables, but besides that they had a huge ice cream laboratory – I can’t find other words for it. Tipico speciale esculsivo. Shovel, shovel, shovel. In Italy, they kill for the scoops. Chinese and Arabs have the scoops. Hard ice cream – a curse, a fake and absurd! The real one is only from Cremeria (cream is the only name for it) Funivia (this means funicular). It is almost a non-cold substance, which ends traitorously fast in your cup, so people take it away in boxes.

You see only local people in line. Outside, despite rain and cold, with only one purpose, to get boxes of ice cream from sparkling nickel jugs and glass flasks. Additionally, they are after ice cream cakes and that goddamn thing – how is it even possible? Pear sorbet! Some of them also get sandwiches, scoops in a bun!!! What a carbohydrate knockout?!!!

Lump together all the Italian gastronomic names and you still get less flavors than there’s on this shelf, which reminds me of an operation room or a boutique counter.

Prickly white light whips up cassatas, sicilianis, amaretto, delightful pink grapefruits and all other limone, just like a part of that fantastic Amalfi giant. It literally falls into pieces in the mouth, makes you hide and doesn’t let you leave the store, because you understand that now for the first time in your life you’ll do it six times in a row and you wouldn’t be able to stop. Six times nonstop you’d order and devour this damned drug, and you’ll become its fan, you will preach it, you will lead crowds to this immoral dissolute dealer.

«Listen. Put your hands down. Take it easy. Stop guzzling! And get away from the stall at last!» my husband said.

And so, it was kind of like this that we visited the ice cream parlor in Bologna.

Assuming this is referring to temperature it would help to know more info.  OR you could say “it was no more than 60°F”

“As I leave the house, as I leave the house – just behind the marina crashes a wave” (c).

The same is here.

Get downstairs from you room, go through the painted reception hall, open the fancy door and at once you’re in a tent.

Which faces the parapet, and the pierce, and the lake. There you can sail gracefully on a lacquered taxi-boat, pick up your vis-à-vis wearing a dress with a long train (if it’s a girl), then lift her in your arms and get her onto the pier – right towards the table. If it isn’t a girl, the same is possible, though.

So, this is a pretty much regular villa, and a very beautiful one. Someone like Maria Callas could really dwell in here. Nothing boded trouble: in such places there are usually stupid snobbish restaurants with moron food and chefs with unutterable names.

However, nothing of the sort happened this time.

I’m not talking about the prices. It’s a fancy restaurant: pasta at 30+eur, main courses up to 50eur.

But the food – mummy-get-me-back-in-your-tummy!

We each had a snack and shared 4 pastas: in the end, each of us got 2 pastas.

I’ll tell you right away that we had to finish up with the pasta list in the menu: we wolfed down 6 of them (!). It was a gastro-feat! Despite the small portions, it was still way too much, but we had no fucking choice, as it was literally impossible to stop.

Let’s begin with crudo, a very worthy crudo, and a really fantastic dish Culatello di Zibello – ham king with fucking awesome confiture.

Then the bacchanalia began.

Cold pasta with black caviar – actually, you can just fucking throw the caviar (though it brings salt and sea to the dish) and have the plain pasta, which have been boiled in such a way! – apparently, they boil it in a broth. Really, that’s what those cheaters do.

Then, there were raviolis with some white flakes of cheese, which were crunchy like popcorn, some fucking al dente ravioli.

Pasta with a tail, fusilli with potatoes (the only faint item), risotto with truffle and cheese, which had a slightly mint taste, super soup, and 8 extraordinary cheeses.

And… the fucking bomb: the thing is in the form of a rose, it’s wet inside, with a bowl of sweet/vanilla sauce and some elaborated ice cream.

Our room, which used to be the owner’s room with a balcony and a terrace, and which seemed just perfect for us at the beginning, – all of a sudden got literally inaccessible: it was on the goddamn third floor. It’s been a long time since we retreated so shamefully: overcoming each step was hard labor, possible just in infernal slow motion.

PS: We decided to try something dietary for lunch, like a pigeon. And what do you think? It was one of the best pigeons, and I’ve gobbled up around a hundred of them during my lifetime.

PPS: The only downside: it’s very much the opposite of the «for free» thing.

This place here is indeed about the food and nothing else, even the interior design is fucking nothing so that people are not distracted.

€145 for a set.

Oh well, it isn’t for free. And what did you expect? Grand Chef Relais & Châteaux, part of les grandes tables du Monde. Besides two Michelin stars which on its own is nothing special.

Usually Michelin-starred restaurants in Italy are hell and Israel, but here it seems like the first two titles do the job and they’re given for a reason.

Obviously not for beautiful plates.

I’ll tell you right away, it is fucking delicious.

Somethings in the set are more interesting, somethings less so, but in general, everything is talented.

Now, first things first.

You are driving for a very long time until posh neoclassic buildings on Via Mosca grow into boring plane three-story blocks.

An unremarkable street, opaque windows, a bell at the entrance – everything’s the way we love it (c).

We enter. White interior, almost as white as in a hospital, without a thing. And that is good or did you come here to look at the pictures? Despite that it is Monday night, the place is full.

Of course, we get the set. As a rule, by means of compliments I understand if the food’s going to be tasty or it’s just some “photo-food”. Here it was the third dish: A mussel with cold buffalo ricotta, pea flowers, tomato and celery. Such a candy that blows up in your mouth and rests there as an echo for another five minutes.

Further, it is necessary to mention the super talented soups, all with peas and beans, endowed with a heap of herbs/sprouts, extremely complicated and with taste nuances.

The next victory is the tuna tartare sauce clamped between the thinnest dry bread layers with additives — wow!

After relaxing just for a moment, we get their next move: Crude cuttlefish with a constructor! You cut it lengthwise, divide it and eat from the right side / from the left side, having two contrary in taste structures. The bomb!

There was also quite worthy lamb, but without revelations.

But the THREE PASTAS AFTERWARDES! Oh my gosh! Simply fucking amazing! Whether the first one with mashed potatoes and tomatoes inside on the substrate of crude carabineros, whether the tortelli with meat ragout or the last one, the masterpiece, spaghetti “without a thing” in onion sauce. Easily fucking possible to take a bite of the plate in oblivion.

Then there was a strawberry lollipop in ricotta foam and a citrus «notebook» as a final point.

Here our report comes to an end. Thank you all. The outlay is finished.

PS: oh yeah, and excellent, really great wine accompaniment.