ristorazione — Orbetello · Toscana
On the Giannella tombolo, where the Orbetello lagoon and the Tyrrhenian Sea brush against each other without ever quite touching, Le Piscine dal Ricca holds a rare address: a restaurant that has made the watery landscape of the Maremma its very reason for being.
The approach to the restaurant already marks the distance from the ordinary world: the Strada Provinciale della Giannella (the provincial road running along the Giannella) runs narrow between two expanses of water, the lagoon on one side and the Tyrrhenian on the other, and getting there is already part of the ritual. This strip of the Grosseto Maremma, where lagoon and marine environments coexist just metres apart, has no equivalent along the Tuscan coast.
The dining room gathers those arriving from the road or the shore and introduces them to a register that needs no invention: Orbetello's gastronomic tradition, built on centuries of fishing in the lagoon and the sea beyond it, is the thread running through every table. The landscape glimpsed beyond the windows is not a decorative backdrop, but the very source of what is served.
From the kitchen come the flavours of local fishing: the raw material comes from the open sea and from the Orbetello lagoon, two environments that yield different, complementary species. The area's seafaring tradition sets the rhythm of the dishes, following what the day's catch brings to the table, with no mediation and no distance between the water and the kitchen's fire.
On the Giannella, between the lagoon and the Tyrrhenian, Le Piscine dal Ricca is the address where coastal Maremma sits down at the table: the page tells the rest of the journey.
