STYLE / RESTAURANTS : Two for the Road in Italy

I don’t go to Italy to eat Italian food. I go to enjoy the cuisine of Tuscany, Sicily, Piedmont, Liguria, Sardinia. The country’s best food is intensely regional--and in many cases, it’s created by women chefs who learned to cook from their mothers and grandmothers.

When I went back this fall, I visited restaurants where I’ve had meals that are etched into my taste memory. Late October is a perfect time: Summer crowds are long gone, the grape harvest is in and, more important, menus are resplendent with porcini and white truffles, intricate pasta and risotto dishes, feathered game and the other dishes that go so well with the robust red wines of Piedmont and Tuscany. In short, it’s heaven.

But those grueling foodie expeditions, two or three weeks of eating every meal at a very serious restaurant, are not for me. When would I wouldn’t have time to search out the best porchetta (roasted pig) sandwich in Umbria--so succulent with its crackling skin and stuffing of wild fennel, garlic and black pepper that I had to go back three times in one day? Or to taste Luciano Sandrone’s new Dolcetto straight from the cask along with homemade salame and bread baked in the village’s communal bread oven? Besides, eight hours a day at a table, with a five-hour drive between lunch and dinner, is not my idea of fun. I know enough to pace myself; I want to be hungry to appreciate the food.

Especially the ones at dal Pescatore and Ristorante Guido, two places no one would ever just stumble across. Even with directions, these restaurants are not easy to find. Over the years, I’ve reached them via some curious adventures--bouncing down pitch-dark country roads, accosting winemakers on tractors for directions and, once, taking up an old gentlemen’s offer to show me the way on his bicicletta . After reacquainting myself with them, I must say that both are even better today than I remember.

Each time I go to dal Pescatore near Canneto sull’Oglio, outside Cremona in northern Italy, I inevitably get lost. In late fall and winter, there’s the fog to confuse things, and it’s not easy following the obscurely placed signs to localita Runate, population 35. The ivy-covered restaurant stands at the edge of a lonely country road, with the small Oglio River behind. As we drive up, Nadia Santini pedals toward us in her chef’s whites, the basket of her bicycle filled with the season’s last deep-gold squash blossoms. Out back, her father-in-law, Giovanni, tends the terraced beds of the kitchen garden that slopes down to the river, while in the kitchen, his wife, Bruna, expertly rolls out the pasta for her famous tortelli di zucca, a pasta stuffed with pumpkin. Nadia’s husband, Antonio, is inside, checking the wine cellar, a stupendous compendium of great Italian wines.

The restaurant gets its name from Antonio’s grandfather, who was a fisherman, or pescatore. An old photo, taken when Antonio was a boy, shows his mother and grandmother cleaning fish outside, in front of fishing nets hung out to dry. Today this small outpost is an elegant two-star restaurant.

Nadia, who looks scarcely out of her teens, has been cooking 22 years. She’s an instinctual cook steeped in the traditions of this region near Mantua where the food is still very much based on Renaissance cooking. Her cooking is completely seductive. I want to eat the grilled eel, the horsemeat stew scented with cinnamon, the delicate breaded frogs’ legs again and again. This time, we start with a rustic fresh salame and culatello, a superb cured pork loin, sliced so fine that it is almost transparent and dropped like a handkerchief on the plate. Agnoli, meat-stuffed pasta the size of a wedding ring, float in a bowl of rich yellow chicken stock. Just as I lower my spoon to take a first taste, the waiter pours in about a glass of Lambrusco, which has to be the best use anyone has ever found for this lightweight red wine. Nadia serves a spectacular pasta of shaved bottarga , or pressed and dried tuna roe, with pieces of sweet, barely cooked black bass, and after that, a risotto of pearly al dente grains of rice shot through with sauteed porcini, fresh peas and ribbons of zucchini blossom. Only then did she send out what I’d driven all this way for: tortelli di zucca , a supple handmade pasta stuffed with bright orange pumpkin, crushed amaretti and mostarda , candied fruit dosed with sharp mustard essence. It’s sweet and hot at the same time, as intricate as a Renaissance tapestry.

Glistening mostarda di Cremona is served alongside duck breast cut as thick as lamb chops, seared rare and served in an aceto balsamico sauce made with the aged vinegar from Modena. My only regret is that I can’t stay for dinner the next night. That big pot of water heating in the courtyard is part of the preparations for the two women “specialists” hired to kill a half-dozen of the restaurant’s geese for a special feast. Clients who live a few miles away have asked Nadia to cook a menu of traditional dishes of the first day of the fog: goose cracklings and polenta, a soup of cabbage and rice, and a casserole of goose simmered with cabbage and other vegetables. Maybe next year.

Dal Pescatore, near Canneto sull’Oglio, about 20 miles from Cremona in Lombardy, 011-39-376-723-001. Prix fixe menu 115,000 lire ($72). Closed Mondays, first two weeks of January and last two weeks of August. Two Michelin stars. No rooms, but you can ask the Santinis to reserve one at a nearby hotel.

Several carloads of diners--Germans on holiday, Italians who have driven down from Milan, Americans on the Barolo and white truffle circuit--pull up at the same time in the little square of Costigliole d’Asti, a hilltown just outside Asti, southeast of Milan in northwest Italy. We all crowd around Ristorante Guido’s entrance, waiting for the door to open. When it does: Pow! the unmistakable, intoxicating scent of white truffles hits us. “Buona sera, buona sera, “ call out Guido Alciati and his sons Piero and Andrea as we descend below street level, the heady aroma of truffles getting stronger with each step. In the dining room, the tables are set with rose damask tablecloths, Riedel glasses and heavy silver. At the center of the room is ground zero: a pile of fist-sized truffles on a silver platter.

Truffle season in Piedmont, where Alba’s prized funghi are known as diamante bianchi (white diamonds) lasts from late September through December. And while truffles are a big draw (the 35-seat restaurant goes through thousands of dollars’ worth a week), everyone is really here for Lidia Alciati’s exquisite Piedmontese cooking and for the extraordinary wine cellar Guido Alciati has put together over three decades. Lidia has had two Michelin stars for more than 20 years, yet she still cooks every dish herself. Her middle son, Ugo, helps with breads and desserts. The one prix fixe menu, at 100,000 lire (about $72 these days), is not written down. Lidia simply sends out the food, course after exceptional course.

Two years ago, Piero Alciati wrote out the wine list for the first time. But few people consult it. Instead, they go down to the cellar and browse. Or they let him choose the wines. He’s a remarkable sommelier, thoughtful about what would please or astound you, what wine to pair with this dish or that. And he has everything to play with: Ristorante Guido’s is one of the few cellars in Italy with such depth of vintages for not only the long-lived Barbarescos and Barolos of the region but also the best red wines from Tuscany. I’ve kept notes on the meals I’ve eaten here over the years: Each has been flawless. This time, after a glass of Barbaresco producer Bruno Giacosa’s brut, we start with carne cruda , fine slices of Piedmont’s exquisite raw veal, an extraordinary, almost irridescent pink in color. Garnished with just a touch of green-gold olive oil and a few drops of lemon, it is blanketed with truffle shavings so fragrant that the scent leaps from the plate. Then comes a glorious dish of firm white salt cod layered with waxy yellow potatoes and porcini, covered with a drift of truffles. It’s actually a dish that Lidia’s grandmother used to cook on Christmas Eve. Next is a delicate cabbage leaf stuffed with fresh pork sausage, carrots and herbs, set down in a swirl of orange and chartreuse carrot and zucchini sauces.

But all this is mere prelude to what we’ve all been waiting for: Lidia’s ethereal hand-pleated agnolotti, tiny packets of bright yellow pasta thin enough to let the colors of the stuffing show through. Andrea Alciati shaves so much truffle on top that the agnolotti disappear beneath the onslaught. Stuffed with finely chopped roasted pork, veal, rabbit, spinach and Parmesan, they burst with juices and flavor, eliciting groans with each bite. “ Porca miseria !” exclaims a Tuscan friend, eating them for the first time. “This can ruin you for the rest of your life.”

The meat course is stracotto di bue , beef braised in the same ’78 Barolo served with the dish, its only accompaniment a square of polenta made from stone-ground corn and a bit of the burnished red braising juices. This sauce with this wine is the essence of austerely elegant Piedmontese cooking. The meat, so tender you could cut it with a spoon, is provided by a butcher in the mountains near Cuneo. The chalky white cheese robiola di Roccaverano , made with equal parts sheep and goat milk, came from a little farm high in the hills where the family has been buying the rounds for more than 30 years.

Ugo Alciati’s desserts rival those of any three-star restaurant. First of all, there’s his sumptuous panna cotta , or “cooked cream,” barely sweetened and as sensual as anything I’ve ever eaten. I also love his bonet , an old-fashioned chocolate custard pudding laced with caramelized pears. By the time the plate of miniature sweets arrives, we are satiated, but still can’t resist the truly exquisite piccolo pasticceria : fragile little meringues sandwiched with cream, grapes dipped in pink chocolate, shimmering fruit jellies and knobby hazelnut cookies. As we finally don our coats at 1 a.m., after five hours of feasting, we’re not the last to leave. Several tables are still deep in discussion and Barolo.

Guido Ristorante, 27 Piazza Umberto I, Costigliole d ‘ Asti in Piedmont, 011-39-141-966-012. Prix fixe menu 100,000 lire (about $63); truffle supplement based on market price. Dinner only. By reservation only. Closed Sundays and holidays , Dec. 22 through Jan. 15 and Aug. 1 through Aug. 20. Two Michelin stars. Last year, the Alciatis opened a six-room hotel, Albergo San Giacomo, in nearby Agliano Terme . Rooms are 250,000 lire ($160) with breakfast and may be reserved through the restaurant.