A Culinary Journey Through
Campania

Bufala e Pomodoro Confit

Slow-roasted San Marzano tomatoes · Mozzarella di Bufala DOP · Cetara anchovy oil · Campanian basil · Aged Castelvetrano olive oil

This antipasto is a meditation on the holy trinity of Campanian cuisine. Plump San Marzano tomatoes DOP, grown in the volcanic ash soils between the towns of San Marzano sul Sarno and Sarnese-Nocerino, are slow-roasted at low heat for four hours with garlic, wild oregano, and a whisper of Calabrian chili, concentrating their natural sweetness and umami into a jammy, almost caramelized confit. Each tomato is placed alongside a hand-torn ball of Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP, sourced from the buffalo herds of the Piana del Sele flatlands near Paestum — the milk is still warm when it leaves the caseificio each morning, producing a cheese of extraordinary freshness, a porcelain-white exterior giving way to milky, slightly acidic layers within.

A drizzle of Colatura di Alici di Cetara — the liquid gold of the Amalfi Coast, a fermented anchovy essence produced in the tiny fishing village of Cetara following a technique inherited from ancient Roman garum — ties the plate together with a saline, oceanic depth that amplifies every other flavor without announcing itself. The dish is finished with fresh Genovese basil from Campanian greenhouse growers and a pour of Ravece monocultivar extra-virgin olive oil from the Irpinia hills of Avellino province.

Paccheri al Ragù di Maiale Nero Casertano

Bronze-die paccheri pasta · Sunday-style slow-braised Caserta black pork ragù · Fiordilatte di Agerola · fresh ricotta · toasted pine nuts

The Ragù Napoletano is arguably the most labor-intensive and spiritually significant dish in the Campanian canon — a preparation that demands no fewer than six hours of patient simmering, the sauce deepening from scarlet to a rich burgundy-brown as the collagen from the meat dissolves into the braising liquid. For this version, we use the extraordinary Maiale Nero Casertano — the ancient Caserta black pig, a native Campanian breed raised semi-wild on acorns, chestnuts, and roots in the hills of the Caserta and Benevento provinces. Nearly extinct a generation ago, this heritage breed has been revived by passionate small farmers committed to preserving Campania's agricultural biodiversity. Its darker, more marbled meat produces a ragù of profound, almost smoky depth.

The pasta: paccheri, the wide, short tubes beloved in Naples, hand-crafted from stone-milled Campanian durum wheat semolina through bronze dies for maximum surface roughness. Each tube captures and holds the sauce inside its hollow, delivering an exquisite sauce-to-pasta ratio in every bite. The dish is finished at the table with freshly grated Provolone del Monaco DOP — a semi-aged stretched-curd cheese from the Monti Lattari peninsula above the Amalfi Coast — and a cloud of hand-ladled sheep's milk ricotta from the flocks of the Cilento.

Branzino all'Acqua Pazza del Golfo

Wild Tyrrhenian sea bass · "crazy water" broth · Gaeta olives · Cetara capers · Piennolo cherry tomatoes · Sorrento citrus zest

Acqua pazza — "crazy water" — is one of the most ancient preparations in the Mediterranean, a fisherman's technique originating in the waters off the Campanian coast where fresh seawater was combined with olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, and whatever was pulled fresh from the nets. The dish carries the salt of the Tyrrhenian Sea in its DNA. Our branzino (sea bass) is sourced daily from the sustainable small-boat fishermen working the waters between Pozzuoli and Capri — hook-and-line caught, never trawled, and delivered to port in the hours before service.

The fish is poached in a broth built from roasted fish bones and heads, enriched with crushed Piennolo del Vesuvio cherry tomatoes DOP — the extraordinary hanging tomatoes grown on the slopes of Vesuvius, whose thick skins and low water content create an intensely concentrated sweetness quite unlike any other tomato on earth. Gaeta olives from the Lazio-Campania border add a gentle bitterness; Cetara capers packed in sea salt provide briny counterpoint; and the zest of an organic Sorrento IGP lemon, grated fresh at the pass, cuts through with aromatic citrus brightness that lifts the entire dish skyward.

Selezione di Formaggi Campani

Provolone del Monaco DOP · Caciocavallo Silano DOP · Aged Pecorino Bagnolese · Annurca apple mostarda · Cilento chestnut honey · walnut conserva

Campania's cheese culture is as ancient as its viticulture, and this selection presents three distinct expressions of the region's pastoral tradition. Provolone del Monaco DOP is the great aged stretched-curd cheese of the Monti Lattari — the limestone mountains above Positano and Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. Its name ("monk's provolone") recalls the cheesemakers who would descend from the mountains to Naples markets in monk-like cloaks. Aged a minimum of six months, it develops a semi-firm, slightly elastic paste with complex notes of butter, grass, and a distinctive sharpness earned in the cool mountain air.

The selection continues with a slice of Caciocavallo Silano DOP — the teardrop-shaped aged cheese of the Apennine foothills, produced by hanging the forms in pairs over wooden beams, where they develop their characteristic sharpness over months of cave aging. The course culminates with a wedge of Pecorino Bagnolese, a raw sheep's milk cheese from the Bagnoli Irpino area in the heart of the Irpinian highlands near Avellino — rustic, crumbly, and perfumed with the wildflowers of mountain pastures at 1,200 meters elevation.

Accompaniments: a jar of Annurca apple mostarda — prepared from Campania's beloved IGP apple, a squat, fragrant variety with ancient Roman heritage — alongside a comb of raw chestnut honey from the Cilento beehives of the Gole del Calore valley, and a house-made conserva of toasted Campanian walnuts and dried Cilento figs macerated in aged Strega herbal liqueur.

Sfogliatella Riccia con Crema al Limone di Sorrento

Freshly baked sfogliatella riccia · Sorrento IGP lemon pastry cream · wild strawberry coulis · toasted Campanian almonds · limoncello zabaione

The sfogliatella is Naples made edible — clam-shaped, shatteringly crisp on the outside, warm and yielding within. The riccia style (the curly, laminated pastry shell, as opposed to the frolla shortcrust variation) is an exercise in patience: sheets of lard-enriched dough are stretched paper-thin, rolled, curled into shells, and baked until the outermost layers separate into hundreds of golden, translucent shards that catch the light. The recipe followed here traces its lineage to the Convent of Santa Rosa on the Amalfi Coast, where Dominican nuns first created the pastry in the 17th century using semolina and ricotta, before a Neapolitan pastry chef — Pasquale Pintauro — brought it to Via Toledo in Naples in the 19th century and changed the city forever.

The filling is reworked for a fine-dining context: a warm pastry cream made with the juice and zest of Sorrento IGP lemons — the fragrant, thick-skinned lemons grown on terraced hillsides above Sorrento and Massa Lubrense, their essential oil so powerful it perfumes the hands for hours. Alongside: a delicate coulis of wild Cilento strawberries, the tiny, intensely sweet berries that ripen in the spring hillsides of the Cilento National Park, and a scattering of Campanian almonds from the orchards of the Vesuvian slopes, lightly toasted in Benevento chestnut honey. At the table, a warm limoncello zabaione is poured over the sfogliatella — limoncello produced from Amalfi Coast lemon rinds, whisked with egg yolks and prosecco into an ethereal, barely-set foam.