RealeA former monastery at the edge of the national park

A laboratory inside a monastery

Castel di Sangro, Italy — Tasting menu in a former monastery.

Niko Romito calls the place the engine of his whole creative world: a laboratory where ingredients and flavour are actually studied, and from which the other projects grow out and are rewritten for their own settings. On the plate it becomes one method: study a single thing to the end, draw out its deepest layer of flavour, then work it with complex handling until that flavour is purer, shorter, sharper. He keeps saying the same thing, that innovation can only come out of research. So a dish has to be good, but not only good: it has to make you think, and open a way that was not there before.

So there is no free ordering. The menu is rewritten each season, one tasting menu from beginning to end, with an a la carte to add from; the whole table takes the same one, because the menu was built for a table.

Niko works the stove and his sister Cristiana works the room. They began with the small restaurant their father left them and ended up in this monastery on the hill.

One restaurant, ten rooms

The house is a sixteenth-century monastery. The restoration kept the rough walls and the white stone, and brought in iron, wood and linen. The white of the dining room is not empty: a single-colour painting by Ettore Spalletti hangs on one wall, neon lettering by Joseph Kosuth glows in a corner, and black-and-white photographs by Mario Giacomelli run along another.

The restaurant began in a small place in the nearby town of Rivisondoli, and the whole of it later moved into the monastery, which had first been made into a small hotel and then given a cooking school. Restaurant and ten guest rooms now share the same group of buildings, so nobody has to drive after dinner.

The order written on one sheet

The menu is rewritten every season, old dishes and new experiments on the same sheet of paper. Most dish names carry only two things, one main ingredient with one plant or one seasoning. They read like a list and eat like a judgement: which layer should stay, which should be pressed down.

Wine can go two ways, with the list or with what the bar makes by mixing and infusing. The list is mostly Italian, and Abruzzo weighs heaviest on it. Around the courtyard there is a trial vineyard planted mainly with Pecorino at 860 metres, with a few rows of Riesling and Pinot Noir under test.