At This Italian Restaurant Near Rome, Dinner Starts in a Cave

At ConTatto Ristorante , a gourmet restaurant in Frascati, Italy — one of the little, hilltop towns that make up the Castelli Romani near Rome — dinner begins in an underground cave. That's where chef Luca Ludovici, who runs the restaurant with his wife Lorena Cavana, serves the amuse bouche, a series of small bites made using ingredients he's been aging and preserving underground.

"There are five factors: the darkness, constant temperature, time, humidity, and mold," he tells me, explaining that based on these five factors, he can influence the flavor and texture of ingredients. "The darkness, for example, preserves colors and prevents things from oxidizing." 

When my husband and I dined there recently, Ludovici led us down into the cave, where a few tables were set up for the amuse bouche service and jars of preserved vegetables were stacked. He showed us how he grows mushrooms and even microgreens in the dark, using only the cave's natural humidity. Rice was aging in a terracotta amphora and wheels of cheese were stacked on shelves. He was even aging chocolate down there. He handed us each a slice of cheese topped with housemade marmalade, followed by a miniature chard leaf lacquered with honey mustard and sprinkled with puffed rice.

What he's doing down in the cave isn't just for the amuse bouche, of course. In addition to an à la carte menu, Ludovici offers two tasting menus, one of which was designed to showcase his experiments in the cave. Each of the five courses incorporates ingredients that have been seasoned and refined down there. He calls his concept "sub-zero kilometer," a clever play on the zero kilometer food movement.

One of the most promising young chefs working in and around the Italian capital, Ludovici grew up in Ciociara, a rural area a little more than an hour from Rome, and studied at the hotel school in Fiuggi, a village known for its curative waters. After graduating, he spent a couple of formative years at Le Gavroche, a two Michelin–starred French restaurant in London; followed by a stint at Le Calandre, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant by Massimiliano Alajmo; and taught at ALMA, the Italian culinary school, alongside legendary chef Gualtiero Marchesi.

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When he and Cavana decided to open a restaurant of their own, they initially searched for a place in Rome and often visited the Castelli Romani in their free time, as Romans have been doing for centuries. Frascati sits on an ancient settlement and became a retreat for noble families who built lavish villas there during the Renaissance. The caves hidden underneath the historic center date back centuries and are sometimes used as wine cellars for the local wines produced in the surrounding countryside. 

One day, Cavana saw an ad for a restaurant at a real estate agency and suggested they check it out. The couple visited the space with a real estate agent and immediately fell in love with it. "I loved that it was a historic place, an old fraschetta (a rustic restaurant in the region) divided into two spacious dining rooms. Then, seeing the cave, I realized it had a lot of potential," Ludovici says. "That was the cherry on top of the cake."

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Over the course of the dinner, we tasted five unique and flavorful dishes made using ingredients from the cave paired with a bottle of biodynamic wine made with rare Capolongo grapes by Palazzo Tronconi , a small organic winery in Ciociara. There was a cardoncello mushroom grown in the cave, served over a pecorino sauce and topped with nori; tiny gnocchetti with a wild herb sauce, candied lemon, and Marzolina cheese aged in the cave; cave-aged rice cooked in an amberjack reduction with ciauscolo sausage and paprika; charcoal-grilled suckling pig with hibiscus flowers and black garlic; and a delicate mousse made with chocolate aged in the cave. Each bite was full of flavor.

It was one of the most unique and memorable meals I've had in a long time. When I ask Ludovici how he would define his culinary philosophy, he responds, "A constant search for raw material and an obsession with how to exalt it." Though he doesn't want to be pigeonholed into only doing food in a cave, he acknowledges that the concept is unique. For adventurous diners looking to try something new, it's an experience worth traveling for.

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