Ristorante La Posta | The Panigacci Dinner

An accidental Saturday night in Equi Terme

We had not planned to be there. We had planned to go to Da Remo, our usual place down in Monzone, twenty minutes away at the bottom of the valley, where the wild boar stew is dark and slow, and the bread is hot, and the bill embarrasses you. But Da Remo was closed for renovation, or for a death in the family, or for one of the reasons small Italian restaurants close, and we had not driven all the way down from Marciaso for nothing. So Sophia opened the Fork app on her phone and worked through the few options inside fifteen kilometers, and the only place in Equi Terme that came up as bookable for that night was an Albergo Ristorante La Posta, which we had passed a hundred times and never been into, on Via Provinciale, opposite the parking lot where we left the car at seven o’clock on what I think now was a Friday in early November.

The first thing we saw before we got to the door was two men cooking bread over a fire in a small open hut next to the restaurant. They were not what I would…