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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Da Enrico
By Peter SnowdonIn 1500, the son of Lucrezia Borgia, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, bought up an old Benedictine monastery in his home town of Tivoli and transformed the site into a hillside palace whose steep, sculpted gardens could provide him with a retreat from the intrigues and harassment of the Papal court in Rome.
Five hundred years later, give or take a few months, Conrad International have done something very similar with the lot adjacent to the World Trade Centre in Bulaq. Instead of a hillside, there are steep curving staircases. Instead of Bernini's Fontane del Bicchierone, there is a wildly undulating sheet of green glass which rises into the air like a headless snake, shaking cool translucent water off its back. And instead of the Villa d'Este itself, with its uninterrupted views across the flood-plain of the Tiber, there is the Villa d'Este restaurant, dressed and lit with all the sumptuous refinement of late Titian, but with none of the master's bleak wildness, its rear wall unexpectedly illustrated with a green-and-ochre panorama of the Arno valley.
This is one of the finest restaurants I have ever eaten in. Not that the food is uniformly successful: in an evening of 10 dishes, maybe three or four were sufficiently wide of the mark to leave one feeling disappointed. Yet it would be mean to quibble. Indeed, the disappointment is itself a wonderful thing, for it is a tribute not only to the extraordinarily high standards set by chef Enrico's successes, but also to his determination never simply to copy or repeat, but always to innovate and surprise.
Villa d'Este is an Italian restaurant. It is Italian on two levels: it has the ability to make even the simplest things seem extraordinarily refined; and it has the gift of devising things which, though fabulously complex and extravagantly unexpected, still retain a core of simplicity and earthiness through which they can connect with and feed into your daily life.
As evidence of the first, I would cite the pasta, and even more the risotto: if pasta is the body of Italian cooking, risotto is its heart. The Villa d'Este's risotto allo zafferano con funghi is everything risotto should be: intense almost to the point of sweetness, slow-limbed, yet profoundly nourishing. Likewise, the spaghetti with courgettes, shrimps and fresh clams in a cream sauce was an object lesson in how to create something infinitely light and delicious out of what, in other hands, could all too easily have turned out an unseemly, turgid mess.
I could go on: the perfect judgement of texture and flavour evident in the insalata tricolore, the Matisse-like riot of forms that jarred and jibed until they coalesced into rack of lamb, the sheer undiluted and unending gorgeousness of the controfiletto alla Senese... And I could pick and fuss, too, if I wanted (the blandness of the Bressaola, the watery ravioli con caponata that accompanied an over-salted red mullet...). But in the end, such details are meaningless, when the whole is an experience of sheer delight at being taken seriously in one's desires.
The Villa d'Este raises food to the level of art, without ever forgetting that it is food, first and foremost. Go there, and be amazed.
A four-course dinner for three, with two bottles of Egyptian wine, cost LE555.
Villa d'Este, Conrad International Hotel, Corniche Al-Nil, Bulaq, Cairo.
Tel. 5808000
