Where we cook on the Costa Smeralda
The coast is short and the good houses are concentrated. We cook in Porto Cervo itself, around Romazzino and Cala di Volpe, at Liscia di Vacca and Pitrizza, in Baja Sardinia and Cannigione along the gulf, at Poltu Quatu, and down to Porto Rotondo and Portisco.
The villas here were designed by architects who cared, which usually means a kitchen that opens onto a terrace built around the granite rather than flattening it. It also means the outdoor space is the room that matters, and dinner is planned around where the light goes at eight in the evening rather than around the dining table.
One thing worth saying plainly, because on this coast people search for it in those words: we do catering in a villa, but not for forty guests or more. Below that nothing arrives cooked in trays. A chef works in your kitchen, shops that morning, cooks for your table that evening and leaves it clean. Up to thirty-nine at the table is the service, and at that size it is the best version of an evening here; if you need a hundred covers delivered to a marquee, you want somebody else and we will say so.
What Sardinia gives us
Sardinia is not mainland Italy and its food says so. Bottarga, the cured mullet roe from Cabras that the island grates over everything and that costs what it costs for good reason. Pecorino sardo. Culurgiones, the stuffed pasta pinched shut like a wheat ear. Porceddu, suckling pig cooked slowly over myrtle wood, which is the dish for a long table.
And Vermentino di Gallura, grown in the granite hills a few kilometres from the coast, which is the wine this food was built alongside. The fish comes from the Maddalena archipelago just north. A menu from within fifty kilometres of the house is not a constraint here, it is the best option available.
A very short season
This is the shortest season of any of our destinations. The Costa Smeralda works from June to early September and then closes, properly: in October much of it is shuttered. Everything concentrates into ten or twelve weeks, and August is when the coast is at its absolute fullest.
That compression is the reason to book early here more than anywhere else we work. In August a chef for a full week is arranged months in advance, and the houses that arrange it late do not get one.
Everything arrives from somewhere else
The Costa Smeralda has very little behind it. Almost everything that is not caught locally comes over from Olbia, the season is short enough that suppliers open in June and close in September, and in the four weeks either side of Ferragosto the whole coast is competing for the same deliveries. A chef who works here year after year has the numbers of people who answer in August, and that is most of the job.
What is genuinely local is worth building the menu on: the fish landed along this coast, bottarga, Sardinian cheeses, suckling pig done properly, and the flat breads. The houses are spread from Porto Cervo itself out to Romazzino, Cala di Volpe and Liscia di Vacca, and the distances are short but the roads are slow in season, so your chef plans one shop a day rather than three.
The same goes for the people. A long table on a terrace here usually wants more than a chef in the kitchen: private waiters to serve and clear so nobody at the table gets up, and somebody on the drinks. We staff that for Porto Cervo and across Sardinia, and it is worth saying at the booking rather than the week before — in August the waiters on this coast are committed as far ahead as the chefs are. For a private dining evening of any size, that is the part people leave until last and should not.
