ristorazione — Novellara · Emilia-Romagna
On the plain of Reggio, in Novellara, an address on via Amerigo Vespucci conceals something rare: a domestic door that opens onto a kitchen of memory, where forgotten dishes return to the table with the same care with which they were first invented.
Homesteria has no lit sign and no menu at the door: it is a home restaurant, and its threshold is crossed only by reservation. Elisa Romani welcomes guests into her own home in Novellara, turning every service into a deliberate act of hospitality, where nothing is left to chance and every detail answers to a precise choice.
The room tells of a cuisine that seeks not novelty but recovery: dishes that collective memory had stopped passing down, recipes from Italian popular tradition in its broadest sense. Among the offerings is also Judeo-Roman cuisine, with scorched herbs prepared as the tradition of the ghetto (the historic Jewish quarter of Rome) dictates, a heritage that few still keep alive.
At Homesteria's stove, raw materials are selected with the same rigour as the recipes themselves: Slow Food-listed products such as caciocavallo podolico cheese and guanciale from Molise's black pig enter the preparations not as garnish but as the very structure of the dish, carrying with them stories of farms and territories far from the Po Valley plain.
The destination is the dish: tortelli verdi reggiani made with ricota felsa, faithful to a recipe that Novellara has guarded for centuries.
