My private Italy: In Piedmont, eat like a “Piemontese”

I am sitting at a restaurant with some friends who are new to the area, and the moment usually comes around the fourth antipasto. The vitello tonnato has come and gone, then a plate of raw beef cut with a knife, then roasted peppers glistening with anchovy sauce, then a small savoury flan, and the waiter is already approaching with something else. Someone  whispers, a little worried: “Is this the whole meal?” And I always give the same answer, with a smile: “No. It’s only the beginning.”

I love travelling to Piedmont because it surprises almost everyone. It eats like the kingdom it once was. For centuries, this corner of north-western Italy, pressed against the Alps and the French border, was the heart of the House of Savoy, the dynasty that would eventually unify Italy and give the country its first king. A royal court needs a serious kitchen, and Piedmont’s cooks spent generations talking with colleagues across the Alps. That dialogue between French refinement and Alpine peasant cooking is still what makes this table so unique: elegant sauces next to humble stews, butter and hazelnuts, wine and patience.

So pull up a chair next to me and loosen your belt. This is going to take a while.

The long parade of antipasti

In most of Italy, antipasti are a light prelude. In Piedmont, they are a ceremony. The undisputed star is vitello tonnato, thin slices of slow-cooked veal covered in a creamy sauce of tuna, capers and anchovies. It sounds like an odd combination until you taste it, and then you understand why the Piedmontese have served it at every family celebration for two centuries.

Then comes the carne cruda all’albese, raw veal from the prized white Fassona breed, chopped by hand with a knife and seasoned only with olive oil, lemon and salt; in autumn, a few shavings of white truffle. And finally (but it’s still antipasto), roasted peppers with bagna càuda, insalata russa, a flan of cardoons or cheese fondue: in a traditional trattoria the parade can easily reach six or seven dishes.

Tajarin and agnolotti del plin

When pasta finally arrives, it is almost always one of two, and I could never choose between them. Tajarin are Piedmont’s golden, hair-thin noodles, made with an extraordinary quantity of egg yolks: the richest recipes speak of thirty or even forty yolks per kilo of flour. Simply dressed with butter and sage or with a meat ragù, in autumn they become the perfect canvas for white truffle.

The other is the agnolotti del plin, tiny stuffed pasta filled with roasted meats and vegetables. Plin means “pinch” in Piedmontese, the quick gesture with which each little parcel is sealed between thumb and forefinger. My favourite way to eat them is the most traditional one in the Langhe, al tovagliolo, “in a napkin”: served on a white cloth with no sauce at all, so that nothing distracts you from the filling. Modest on the outside, extraordinarily rich inside, just like its land.

Bagna càuda: a hot sauce with a salty past

If I had to choose one dish to explain the Piedmontese soul, it would be bagna càuda, literally the “hot bath”. It is a sauce of garlic, anchovies and olive oil, slowly melted together and kept warm on the table in a small terracotta pot with a candle underneath, the fujot. Everyone dips raw and cooked vegetables into it: cardoons, peppers, cabbage, Jerusalem artichokes, boiled potatoes. It is a dish for autumn and winter, and the city of Asti celebrates it every November with its own Bagna Cauda Day. A word of warning from experience: don’t plan an important meeting the next morning.

But how did anchovies end up in a region without a sea? For centuries, the mountain valleys of Piedmont traded with the Ligurian coast along the ancient salt roads. Salt was heavily taxed, so merchants hid it under layers of salted anchovies, which were cheap and paid little duty. The anchovies travelled north on mules, and the Piedmontese made them their own. In the Valle Maira, the acciugai, travelling anchovy sellers, kept the trade alive well into the 20th century.

Winter in Piedmont means also bollito misto, one of the most spectacular dishes in Italian cuisine. The rule, at least in its grandest version, is a magic number: seven cuts of beef, seven “extras” (tongue, head, tail, trotter, cotechino sausage, a hen and a rolled meat), and seven sauces, from the bright green bagnet verd of parsley and anchovies to the red bagnet ross of tomatoes and peppers and the sweet and spicy mostarda. Every December since 1910, Carrù, near Mondovì, hosts the Fiera del Bue Grasso, the fair of the fat ox, and on that day restaurants begin serving bollito at breakfast time. You will also meet the brasato al Barolo, beef braised for hours in the region’s greatest wine, and, for the most adventurous of my guests, the finanziera, a stew of offal and cockscombs whose name comes from the frock coats worn by Turin’s bankers, who loved it.

Hazelnuts, chocolate and the invention of gianduja

Langhe is the Italian homeland of hazelnuts. the famous Tonda Gentile, protected as Nocciola Piemonte IGP and considered by many pastry chefs the finest in the world.

Their marriage with chocolate is a story of necessity. In the early 19th century, Napoleon’s continental blockade made cocoa rare and expensive, and Turin’s chocolatiers, already among the best in Europe, began stretching it with ground hazelnuts. The result was gianduja, and in 1865 the Turin company Caffarel shaped it into the little boat-shaped chocolate wrapped in gold foil that we know as the gianduiotto.

A century later, in Alba, a pastry maker’s family named Ferrero took the same idea further. In 1946 Pietro Ferrero sold his first Pasta Gianduja, a solid block to be sliced onto bread; and on 20 April 1964 the first jar of Nutella left the factory in Alba. From the hills of the Langhe, that jar has travelled further than anyone could imagine. In April 2026, during NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon, a jar of Nutella was spotted floating through the Orion capsule just minutes before the crew broke the record for the farthest distance human beings have ever travelled from Earth. NASA quickly said it wasn’t product placement, just part of the astronauts’ food supplies. Still, the best piece of marketing I’ve ever heard of, worth millions of Euros.

Turin gave the world other small wonders, too. Grissini, the crunchy breadsticks, are said to have been created in 1679 by a court baker for the sickly young Duke Vittorio Amedeo II, who could not digest ordinary bread. Vermouth was born here in 1786, when Antonio Benedetto Carpano infused white wine with herbs and spices in his shop near the royal palace.

Cheese, wine and a snail from Bra

Piedmont is also a land of great cheeses, and I always leave with a few in my suitcase: the crumbly, noble Castelmagno from the high valleys of Cuneo, Bra, Raschera, Toma Piemontese, the delicate goat’s milk Robiola di Roccaverano. It is no coincidence that the small town of Bra is the birthplace of Slow Food, and that every other September it hosts Cheese, one of the largest cheese festivals in the world.

And then, of course, there is wine. The hills of the Langhe, Roero and Monferrato, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014, produce some of the greatest reds on the planet from the Nebbiolo grape: Barolo, “the king of wines and the wine of kings”, and its elegant cousin Barbaresco. But I can’t forget mentioning red Barbera and Dolcetto, the crisp white Gavi and the gently sparkling Moscato d’Asti.

As for the white truffle of Alba, if you are here between October and December, you already know what to order.

Three addresses I love

Ristorante Del Cambio (Turin) – Founded in 1757, it is one of the oldest restaurants in Italy, facing the palace where the first Italian parliament met. Its red velvet and gilded mirrors have seen kings, statesmen and writers; tradition says Count Cavour, the architect of Italian unification, had his own table here. Today the kitchen reinterprets Piedmont’s historic recipes with a contemporary touch.

Osteria dell’Arco (Alba) – Opened in 1986 by the same group of friends behind the first Slow Food osteria in Bra, it is where I go when I want traditional Langhe cooking made with ingredients from small producers and Slow Food Presidia: tajarin, plin, carne cruda, vitello tonnato, with a wine list that reads like a map of the surrounding hills.

Locanda in Cannubi (Barolo) – An 18th-century farmhouse surrounded by the vineyards of Cannubi, one of the most famous crus of Barolo. The cooking is rooted in tradition, and drinking a Barolo Cannubi while looking at the very rows of vines it comes from is one of those pleasures I find hard to describe. Check the opening days before you go.

The Piedmontese are famously reserved. They don’t boast, they don’t raise their voices, and they will never tell you their cuisine is the best in Italy. They will simply bring you another antipasto, pour another glass of Nebbiolo and let the table speak for them. And every time the “bunet” arrives at the end of the meal, that dark pudding of cocoa and amaretti. In Piedmont, “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over”.

Ciao da Marcello