One of the best things about visiting food-obsessed friends in a foreign country is that - if you're lucky - you generally get taken to the best places without having to put much of an effort into the decision-making process yourself. And often, after a wonderful meal in the middle of nowhere, you get driven home without having to worry about taxis or late-night trains. This is all, clearly, to the good.
The one teeny downside, though, is that taking such a back seat on planning this meal at Cascina della Taverna, I quite shamefully a) did very little research on the place beforehand, and b) even now couldn't tell you exactly where it was on a map without cheating and using my iPhone picture history. All I knew, as we arrived at this remote farmhouse somewhere over the border to Lombardy, was that it was a family-owned restaurant that specialised in steak cooked over a wood fire. And to be quite honest, that's all I needed to know.
The first indication that this place took their steaks very, very seriously was a menu that boasted a pretty comprehensive selection of cow not just from the local area but from as far afield as Poland, Ireland and Germany. I'm don't know if you've noticed but the Italians are famously, to the very last one of them, almost psycopathically protective of their national cuisine, and for a cut of Hereford beef from Ireland to find its way onto the menu of a restaurant in Lombardy, presumably risking the ire of the locals, is quite a statement of confidence in its quality.
However, I didn't come all this way to eat Irish beef. Instead, I thought I'd start with some horse. In this case, carpaccio, lightly seasoned with salsa verde and drizzled with olive oil, with a lovely firm-but-biteable texture and an interesting gamey flavour somewhere between venison and steak. I'd eaten horse before (not least a fillet steak we cooked in Verona a few days before) but never carpaccio, and it was a genuine revelation how well it worked instead of the usual beef.
But nice though the horse was, I was here for one reason only. And that was a giant Fiorentina steak, dark and crusty on the outside and just touching room temperature in the very centre, cooked in their beautiful wood-fired hearth, in the true Italian farmhouse style. From the list of options I'd decided to go as local as possible, so this Barbina Franciacorta came from, as the name suggests, Franciacorta which is a wine making region just further north west past Brescia. And of course, it was everything I hoped it would be, a masterclass in live-fire technique matched with expert animal husbandry and the usual Italian obsession with finish and quality. Just look at the way that crust glistens, and how dark and rare the meat is next to the bone. Utterly brilliant.
We may have eaten some other things, I can hardly remember. The thing is, I was so far out of my usual blogging mindset I barely remembered to take a photo of the food at all, and would have happily just scoffed down my steak, paid up and then been led back to the car and been driven home like a slightly baffled elderly English relative on a rare trip abroad. I think there were some potatoes, and a bowl of greens, probably puntarelle as they seem to have been on every restaurant menu in Veneto that week. I'm sure they were lovely. But I had my steak and that was that.
I think the bill came to about €70 each, artifically inflated (sorry Italian friends) by my stubborn insistence on the full 3-inch thick Fiorentina rather than any lesser costata on offer. I think you can eat at this place for a lot less, or - as is probably more usual - take a few more people with you to share the Fiorentina. But bugger it, I regret nothing. It was certainly the best steak I'd eaten since Extebarri, and it was a damn sight cheaper than that, let me tell you.
There's no doubt, having stayed in Verona with a blogger friend from way back, that I had a slightly exaggeratedly wonderful experience of the food in this part of the world than would have been the case if I'd just relied on my own research or - horror of horrors - just done the usual tourist thing and eaten wherever looked decent on the day. But that said, outside of a few very dangerously glamorous spots in Verona and Venice, I very much got the impression that €20/coffee ripoff joints very much the exception, and for the most part Italian food really just is that good. And for a case in point, Cascina della Taverna, a shining embassador for one of the worlds great cuisines.
8/10
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