Ristorante Ulisse | A Plate of Raw Porcini
A mushroom tasting menu in the foothills of the Apuane
The bowl came in through the front door at six-thirty, carried by a man in a green fleece who had clearly been in the woods that morning. It was huge. It was the kind of bowl you would use to wash a small dog. It was full to the rim with porcini, big ones, the meaty kind with cap-tops the color of wet leather and stems the thickness of a forearm, and there was still black soil clinging to their bottoms and a few oak leaves caught in the gills. The man set the bowl on the kitchen counter, exchanged two words with the cook, was paid in cash, and left. We were sitting at the table by the window, the only ones in the dining room because we had arrived at six-thirty, the way foreigners arrive at six-thirty in Italy, when the staff had not yet finished folding napkins and the proper Italians did not show up for another ninety minutes. The mushrooms sat there in their bowl, looking at us. I turned to Sophia and said, well, I have ordered the right thing.
Ristorante Ulisse is on Via Campana in Seravezza, behind Forte dei Marmi, in the foothills of the Apuane. We had come up in October because it was porcini season and because, that week, every restaurant for thirty kilometers was advertising the same thing, the funghi on chalkboards and the funghi in the windows, and Ulisse was the one with the mushroom degustation, multiple courses, forty euros, advertised on Facebook with a photograph of a single porcino the size of a man’s hand. Sophia and I had eaten in Seravezza once before, at Il Giardino del Mediceo, when we still lived up at Marciaso, and we had liked the town. A small grey town on the Vezza river, a Medici palace in the middle of it, the marble road into the mountains behind it. So we drove down on a Saturday afternoon, parked, walked, and arrived at Ulisse early.
The room is small. Ten tables, maybe. Wooden floors, paintings of local landscapes on the walls done by, I think, friends of the family, and behind the cash register, an older man with grey hair sitting on a stool reading a newspaper, who I worked out later was Mario Fiori, who has been running this place for thirty-three years. He is in multiple paintings on the wall. The waiter was his son, who spoke a little English and used it precisely, and who brought us the menus and, when I asked, recommended the degustazione di funghi. Sophia ordered off the regular menu, an antipasto, a pasta, and a meat course. The wine list was long. We had a Chianti, I think.
I should tell you about mushrooms first.
Italy knows mushrooms in a way that other countries do not, and Tuscany knows mushrooms in a way that the rest of Italy does not. There are two that everybody outside Italy has heard of: the porcino and the truffle. The truffle has become the celebrity food product of central Italy in the last twenty years, the white one of San Miniato fetching prices that have priced it out of even the local market for most of the year. The porcino is the workhorse mushroom of the Tuscan autumn. It comes up in the chestnut and beech woods of the Apennines and the Apuane between September and October, after the first proper rains, and for those eight or nine weeks, the entire mountain economy bends around it. There are roadside stalls along every minor road in the Garfagnana selling porcini by the kilogram, cash only, weighed on a hand-held spring balance, and the man selling them is the same man who picked them at five in the morning when the woods were still dark. There are restaurants like Ulisse that put on a mushroom-only menu for the season and pull it the day the supply ends. We use mushrooms at home, sliced thin, with garlic, fresh herbs, and a splash of cream, the way Central European kitchens have always used them. I thought I knew mushrooms before I came here. I was about to find out I knew nothing.
The first course was a plate of raw porcini. That is what it was. They had taken one of the big mushrooms from the bowl by the door, presumably the same bowl, and cleaned it, then sliced it thinly across the cap and stem with a sharp knife, and laid the slices on a plain white plate. They had drizzled it with a thin line of green olive oil. They had given it a small pinch of grey salt. They had brought it to the table. There was nothing else on the plate. No herbs. No shaved cheese. No vinegar. No reduction. No drizzle of anything. No sprig of anything. No edible flower. No microgreen. No quenelle of anything. It was raw mushrooms, oil, and salt, and that was the dish.
The waiter put it down with a straight face and recommended a glass of wine to go with it. He did not pretend the dish was complicated. He said, prego, signore. He left.
I looked at the plate for a moment. My face was literally saying: what the f*ck? I have eaten in Michelin restaurants. I have eaten in places where they hand you tweezers and tell you to use them on the food. I have eaten plates that came out of glass cloches with smoke trapped beneath, and the server lifted them off with a small, theatrical bow. I have eaten foam, gel, dust, dehydrated leaf, and ash. I had not, in my entire life of eating, been served a plate this minimal at a serious restaurant. It took, I realized as I sat there with my fork in my hand, a particular kind of confidence to send out a plate of raw mushrooms and salt as the opening dish of a degustazione menu. You either had to be wrong, in which case you were a kitchen that did not know what it was doing, or you had to be so right about your ingredient that nothing else needed to be on the plate, and any further intervention would only be in the way.
There was a myth that circulated during my university years about a guy who applied to study philosophy. There was an open-ended question in the written exam where they asked you about basic concepts, and you had to write an essay on it. It was part of the overall application.
The question was:
What is bravery?
The guy’s answer:
This.
That’s it, nothing else. Just a word, “this.” That story immediately came to mind as I looked at the plate of raw porcini. That took bravery and boldness to serve this up.
But hey. They were right. Of course, they were. The mushroom needed nothing. I ate the entire plate. I ate it slowly, slice by slice, and what I tasted was not what I had been expecting. It was not the deep-cooked mushroom flavor I associated with porcini, the umami concentration that develops when you sauté them in butter or roast them in the oven. It was something quieter, more vegetal, the texture firm and slightly meaty under the tooth, the flavor a kind of clean forest-floor sweetness with a thin metallic edge that the oil softened. The salt brought it forward. The oil rounded it. There was, I realized, an entire dimension of this mushroom I had never met, because I had only ever met porcini after they had been transformed by heat. Raw, lightly oiled, the porcino tastes of itself, and itself turns out to be enough. I did not finish the bread on the side. I did not need to. The whole plate had taken fewer than five ingredients, and the only one of them that required any preparation was cleaning the mushrooms, and the dish was as good as anything I had eaten that year.
This, I thought, is the bistecca alla fiorentina school of cooking applied to a mushroom. The Florentine steak is brave because it is unadorned. A kilo of beef on the bone, the grill, ten minutes, sliced. Salt and maybe oil at the end. No sauce. No dip. No mustard. No reduction. The protein is the dish. The chef is invisible. Baptism by fire. The cooking is the work of someone who trusts that what they have on the cutting board is enough on its own. The plate of raw porcini at Ulisse is the same idea expressed in a different ingredient. The kitchen had complete confidence in its raw material, and that material justified that confidence.
The rest of the menu was excellent and softer. There was a mushroom risotto carried to the table in its own pan and stirred at the last moment with the cheese, and there were pappardelle with porcini in a slow-reduced jus, and there was a smaller dish of mushrooms simply pan-fried with garlic and parsley, which is probably the dish you have eaten in Italy under a hundred names. All of them were good. All of them were what they should have been. None of them was the raw plate. The raw plate had set the bar in a way the rest of the meal was not trying to reach, because the rest of the meal had a different job: to do the cooked-mushroom expressions of the same ingredient, and to do them well.
The last dish surprised me again. The waiter brought a small earthenware bowl, hot from the oven, and inside it were thinly sliced raw mushrooms again, this time with herbs, and on top of them two eggs that had been cracked into the dish and finished in the heat with shavings of cheese melted over the whites, the yolks still runny. Bread, he said, bread for this one. No fork. He demonstrated with a piece of bread held between his fingers, a dipping motion, and a smile. I did as instructed. The bread tore the yolk, the yolk fell into the mushrooms, the mushrooms fell back onto the bread, and you ate the whole construction in two bites, and then you tore another piece of bread, and you went again.
Italians do not eat eggs for breakfast. This is one of the cultural differences I have not fully absorbed in the years I have lived here. Italians do sweet breakfasts. Eggs appear either on pasta (carbonara) or as a main course. The egg at the end of a degustazione menu felt, to my Hungarian-British wiring, exactly backward. Where I come from, eggs are for the morning, with bacon, with toast, with the day starting. It is a staple for Hungarian breakfast, and please, don’t get me started on the Full English, the dish worth dying for.
The egg, as a closing course, read the way it would read if a French restaurant served you cereal as the final flourish of a tasting menu. Strange. But strange in a good way, strange in the way a kitchen that has thought about it has decided.
I ate it. I was full by then. The risotto and the pasta had done their work. But the eggs and mushrooms were the strongest-flavored thing on the table, almost spicy in their forest concentration, and they cut through the heaviness of the cooked mushroom dishes and reset the palate before the bill came. They did not give us a sweet dessert. There was an amaro at the end, dark and bitter, and Sophia was happy with her steak and her pasta and her glass of red and the easy back-and-forth with the waiter who had to translate the wine list for her, and Mario was still on his stool by the cash register reading the same newspaper, and the room had filled up around us at some point without us noticing.
We paid. We thanked them. We walked out into Seravezza in the dark.
The bowl by the kitchen, when we passed it on the way out, was empty. They had used the whole bowl that night, every mushroom in it, and the soil had been swept off the counter, and another bowl was already filling for tomorrow.
If you come to Versilia in October, this is what to do. Not the restaurants on the seafront, where the menu does not change with the season because the customers do not come for the season. Drive ten kilometers inland, into the foothills, and find the kitchens that put up the funghi sign in late September and take it down again at Halloween. Eat the porcini raw if they are offering it that way. Trust the kitchen that does almost nothing to the ingredient. Pay your forty euros. Walk out.
The mushroom is the dish. The kitchen is invisible. This is the highest form of cooking the Apuane do, and it is also the simplest.
