Osteria FrancescanaA red corridor leads to the room, and the walls are charcoal and teal

Tradition, seen from ten kilometres off

Modena, Italy — Eleven courses, or à la carte.

The official site calls the place a laboratory of ideas, and an observation post. Looking back at the past, it says, takes a critical eye rather than nostalgia; tradition is always evolving, which in the original phrasing means standing ten kilometres back from cooking tradition so the best of what is behind can be brought into the future. On paper that turns into dish names: Tagliatelle followed by 10.0, the same pasta still being changed at its tenth version, and another dish named after a question, asking where this bowl of bean pasta goes next.

One tasting menu is offered, called HO FAME! HO FAME!, which reads as I'm hungry, I'm hungry. The name is borrowed from a ceramic kept in the cellar and standing among the bottles. Eleven courses are listed on it.

Massimo Bottura was born in Modena and says he grew up under the kitchen table, his grandmother rolling out pasta while the flour fell on his feet. The room he cooks in now stands in the middle of that same old town.

The red corridor in

The door is on Via Stella and opens into a narrow corridor painted a deep red. On the left a cream-coloured relief panel is set into the wall, cut with five long vertical slits, and light falls across it from the side so that red shows through the openings. A blue-green carpet runs the length of the floor.

At the end of the corridor an opening leads into the restaurant itself. Dark leather chairs stand at the tables, a curved-arm lamp hangs down from the ceiling to the cloth, and two-tone velvet curtains are layered at the windows, gold over dark green, with the light of the street coming through.

The pictures on the wall, the ceramic in the cellar

The walls are painted in two colours. One is a charcoal that reads almost black, and holds a silver-grey painting of a single figure in red silhouette. The other is teal, and carries two prints in white frames, their flowers built up in blocks of colour rather than painted petal by petal.

The official site describes the pictures as windows onto landscapes of ideas, there to keep the conversation between dining room and kitchen going. The phrase I'm hungry was taken from a piece in the cellar. Cooking, the kitchen says, is a living language, and a string of recipes does not come close to it.

One tasting menu, one à la carte list

The tasting menu runs in order, all eleven courses printed on the page, and the names are often whole sentences: one is called Criticism or Nostalgia, another simply Untitled. The à la carte list stays open, divided into antipasti, first courses, mains and desserts, with cheese on a column of its own.

The rule is set out in the questions section: if the tasting menu is taken, the whole table takes the same one. What is printed at midday is what is printed in the evening, so the decision is about when to sit down rather than what will be eaten.