Piazza DuomoA pink room, and the ceiling painted with anchors and a deer's head

The garden comes before the menu

Alba, Italy — Two tasting menus, all year.

The official site puts the garden first. If Enrico Crippa is a painter, the garden is the palette, and the vegetables are the colours he works with every day. He picks them himself each morning and they go straight into the kitchen, which is why the menu has no final version; the site says it changes in real time.

Two menus run all year. One follows the garden as it stands that morning; the other takes Barolo as its subject, setting the refinement of the Savoy court beside farmhouse cooking, with the wine counted as an ingredient rather than a drink. Which one to take depends on the season in front of you.

Crippa was born in Brianza, worked in Milan under Gualtiero Marchesi, and then spent three years in Japan. The garden is at Monsordo Bernardina, a few kilometres outside Alba, and the picking is done the same morning.

Two rooms, two colours

The first room is pink. Walls and vault are painted the same pink, and Francesco Clemente painted across the whole of it: comets, boats, parcels hanging in mid-air, and at the centre an enormous vine leaf closed around a globe. The official site calls it a tribute to the wine family and a mark of different places meeting.

The second room is smaller. Louise Nevelson's tapestries for the opera Orfeo ed Euridice hang on its walls in black, grey-brown and beige and nothing else. The tables along the window look out on the piazza and the cathedral, which is close enough to fill the frame.

The menu follows the garden

The garden sits on the Monsordo Bernardina estate a few kilometres outside Alba: three hectares under open sky and five hundred square metres under glass, growing around four hundred varieties. Picking happens the same morning, and up to three deliveries go from the beds to the kitchen in a day, with almost nothing done to the vegetables in between.

What the menu becomes therefore depends on what was cut that morning. The first is eleven courses set down freely. The second takes Barolo as its subject, joining the precision of the Savoy court to farmhouse cooking, and treats the wine as one more ingredient rather than a pour alongside. Both run all year, at lunch and at dinner.

How the art got in

The Ceretto family holds exhibitions, the chef cooks for the artists who come, and the menu grew out of those dinners before settling into a fixed one. The works in the rooms follow the same line: Clemente's mural, a photograph of the sea by Anselm Kiefer, three lithographs by Andrew Lord, and by the door a photograph by Jean Marie Del Moral of a small Miró sculpture.

The cellar takes the same position as the kitchen. The site says the phrase technical pairing is not one they like: wine is an ingredient, and it should talk to the plate on its own terms. The list is balanced between the benchmarks of a region and the younger small growers, and the sommeliers spend much of the year travelling.