The restaurant offers a wide range of distinctive dishes with various culinary delights using all of the local natural food produce and fresh fish.
Various menus are available – for tourists, first communions, business lunches and ceremonies.
Restaurant prices:
- Breakfast and dinner can be taken in our restaurant, which can also be booked on a day-to-day basis but with 24-hour advance notice.
- Lunch € 10.00 (tourist menu from Monday to Saturday morning, excluding holidays).
- Dinner from € 15.00.
Traditional dishes
The cuisine of the Mid Valley of the Serchio and Garfagnana, like all mountain cooking, is influenced by local poor-farming traditions, but this does not mean that flavours are less enjoyable.
The basic ingredients of the traditional dishes of these areas are mainly based on:
- Corn flour;
- Spelt;
- Chestnuts;
- Mushrooms;
- Pork;
- Game.
Polenta, made using both corn flour and chestnut flour, can be enjoyed with various dressings.
A big favourite is polenta with porcini mushrooms cooked in oil garlic and parsley; of course this dish can be enjoyed in two periods of the year, when the mushrooms are available, between May/June through to the end of the summer season. In that period, it is true to say that mushrooms can be enjoyed in many different ways: fried, grilled, cooked in oil, garlic and parsley, in salads and under oil. Stewed rabbit is also delicious with corn-flour polenta as are other species of game, such as: wild boar, hare, roe deer, pheasant, etc.
At Il Nido dell’Aquila Restaurant, you will taste homemade pasta, like maccheroni, tagliatelle, tordelli, tagliolini e ravioli. They will seasoned with traditional local sauces.
A special dish of the Garfagnana and Mid-Valley mountains is sweet polenta (made using chestnut flour), accompanied by pork bones. This dish represents, the “summa” of the peasant concept of not wasting anything. The bones left after pork processing are in fact marinated in salt with the addition of aromatic herbs and once ready, are boiled and served with the polenta.
Another option is polenta with salted herring or dried and salted cod.
Chestnut flour is then used for other preparations, such as “manafregoli”, “necci” and “castagnaccio”.
Spelt can be enjoyed in salads, boiled and seasoned with vegetables, olives, etc. in minestrone with bean purée, or with mixed vegetables. A local variant of minestrone (vegetable soup) is instead “farinata”. The basic dressing consists of broth obtained from cooking “Biroldi” where, instead of the pasta, corn flour is added to the vegetables, so that on cooling, the whole takes on the consistency of polenta. It is eaten in slices toasted in front of the fireplace or, if you prefer, fried!
Pigs provide numerous traditional products such as: “biroldo” (a cold cut made with the poorer parts of the animal, blood and various spices), lard, brawn head cheese, hams, sausages, local salami and “mondiole” (sausages aromatized with bay leaves).
Last but not least, over recent years, thanks too to the numerous fish farms, trout-based cuisine has developed in the area. The fish can be enjoyed in various ways, such as baked and accompanied by chestnut purée, or cooked in tinfoil with porcini mushrooms and so on.