LAVAGNO - VERONA (UnoNotizie.it)

Last year Gambero Rosso, the prestigious reviewer of restaurants and wine in Italy, held a competition to find the best Carbonara in Rome. The restaurant which won the competition has a head chef from Tunisia and the restaurant which came second has an Indian head chef!! It seems, therefore, that good Italian cuisine is no longer the sole domain of Italian chefs. This is not a bad thing of course, it is merely a part of the globalization of Italian society and sometimes brings prestige with it. One of the five restaurants in Italy with 3 Michelin stars also has a non-Italian chef, the German Heinz Beck.

And Chef Beck is not the only German chef to have defected to Italy. There’s also Oliver Glowig at the 2 star L’Olivo restaurant in Capri and Uli Klaus at the very popular Il Bocconcino Restaurant,  just outside Verona. One thing that most of these foreign chefs have in common is their passion for Italy and Italian cuisine. It is not that they come here just to do a job, but Italy has become their adopted home. Both Klaus and Glowig have expressed a great preference for Italian food over their native German cuisine .

Klaus, who trained to be a chef at Lake Maggiore in northern Italy and worked at among other places at the Relais in San Bonifacio, Verona, before striking out on his own, says that Italian food is not only lighter but so much easier to be creative with. He describes his style of cooking as “creative but based on traditional Italian dishes”.
He also likes to add Mediterranean flavours such as olives and sun-dried tomatoes to many of his dishes especially in the summer months when fish is more prominent on the menu.The menu at Klaus’s Il Bocconcino changes regularly because an important rule for Klaus is to use the freshest seasonal ingredients whenever possible, so in April and May Asparagus tortino (soufflé) or marinated asparagus and strawberries with proscuitto crudo are popular choices as is the pasta with peas and ‘tastasale’ ( a local minced sausage meat) and rombo (brill) and peas in June. In the early summer months Klaus serves fresh strawberries with his pesce spada (swordfish) and freshly picked cherries with the tagliata (sliced fillet) or Angus beef. In his summer creations he likes to combine figs with gorgonzola cheese and rosemary and serve it on a bed of tagliatelle.

Another of Klaus’s techniques for being more creative is to serve traditional dishes in a different way. Hence his Tortelloni filled with coda di bue (oxtail), cinghiale (wild boar)  or anatra (duck). He also likes to make use of local products so his prosciutto crudo comes from Soave and the tarfufi (truffels) from the woods of Montecchia di Crosara and Castelcerino where he also has his home.

Klaus has a secret ingredient which he was willing to talk about because he feels it contributes enormously to the quality of some of his more popular dishes. This is Aglio Orsino a wild plant that grows normally at about 1500m and is part of the garlic family. Every year he and his wife trek into the mountains near Verona to collect the leaves which he then makes into a pesto sauce which is used in pasta and other sauces and for marinating.

In the winter months the menu also includes the occasional German dish such as sausages, sauerkraut and potatoes but these dishes seem to appeal more to the occasional homesick German tourist rather than to his regular Italian clients!
As a final note it’s worth mentioning that Klaus’s wife Tanja, who works with him, is responsible for most of the delicious desserts including the not so Italian Black Forest cherry cake and rubarb cheese cake and the homemade bread rolls that definitely have a German feel about them, but then it means the clients get the best of both worlds.

Il Bocconcino is open  for dinner every day except Wednesday and for lunch on Saturdays and Sundays. They also except bookings for weddings and other parties.
Tel. 00393497721288

Jacqui De Bono


- Uno Notizie Verona -