Buonarrivo

My family is a family of restaurateurs in Tarvisio. They opened the restaurant not long after the war, because we are talking about 1956. We grew up together with Tarvisio, which has always been a crossroads of many cultures, peoples and traditions. Until 1918 we were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the foundations of the culture, including the culinary tradition, come from there, but also from mountain culture. And this is why in traditional cuisine pork dominates above all, because obviously it is also a relatively easy animal to raise, no part of the pig is wasted, pork is easy to preserve through salting and smoking, which were the preservation methods of the past. If we think about local crops, the first thing that comes to mind is potatoes, beans, then all the fruit, apples, pears — there is the Klotzen pear, which is truly typical of this area — the famous plums, known in Italy as Stanley plums, which are the ones traditionally used for dumplings, and maize and therefore polenta. As for traditional cuisine, if we look at the cuisine of the Val Canale, the cuisine of Carinthia, the cuisine of Slovenia, the cuisine of Carnia itself, we find many similarities. Then the question tourists or people who visit the Tarvisio area most often ask us is: “Why fish in Tarvisio?” It is simple: for many years we were the first Italian stronghold for people coming from the East, for the whole northern European world, so to speak, that came down to Italy at the time not only for holidays, but for shopping. They already had pork and potatoes at home.
They crossed the border looking for pizza, spaghetti and calamari. And so, as good traders, that is the kind of offer we developed. Add to this that here there is a strong Neapolitan community due to the market and a considerable enclave of people from the South, because until fairly recently, because of the barracks and customs, many people put down roots here, so the families are here, and this fusion has also influenced the cuisine. And this is why you may find yourself eating fried pizza or Neapolitan ragù, as well as frico, which belongs more to the Friulian tradition, plum dumplings or the goulash typical of the local culture.
A major turning point in local cuisine came about the tremendous work done by the Consortium in creating Ein Prosit, bringing excellence into the valley that changed the way we saw cuisine, through countless training courses, taking us from grandma’s cooking into professional cooking.