By Robert Draper
In Italy’s Dolomites. The views are straight from a snow globe, the meals are the stuff of legend, and the scarcity breeds delicious invention.
Driving on a Ribbon of Ice a mile up and in abject darkness, through the snowiest winter this mountainous swath of northern Italy has seen in 60 years, I chant to myself, as if invoking a patron saint: “Dwarf-pine pesto. Dwarf-pine pesto.”
I’ve been obsessed with the stuff since my previous trip to the Dolomites, when a young restaurateur in a little mountain village slid me a taste of gnocchi topped with a deep green dollop of olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, and finely chopped pine needles from the surrounding forest. That bracing rustic mouthful, combined with the sheer audacity of making pesto out of trees, has been my metaphorical reference point for the Dolomites ever since. There may be better reasons – the ski slopes, the staggering topography, the sumptuous hotels – for testing one’s driving skills against the serpentine Strada delle Dolomiti. But until you’ve tried dwarf-pine pesto, you really can’t say, can you?
The town of San Cassiano at last materializes, and nestled within it, stupendously aglow against the hulking mountains, the Hotel & Spa Rosa Alpina. Kind eyes at the reception desk overlook the snow I’ve dragged in with me. Yes, yes, I’m assured, dinner is still being served. And so upstairs to a lovely new suite redolent of larch wood, where I compose myself and stand on the balcony for a few minutes, blinking mutely at the bluish winterscape. The act of depositing one’s self here, at Italy’s crest, requires just such a moment.
The youthful sommelier at Rosa Alpina’s esteemed restaurant, St. Hubertus, responds to the gleam in my eye by offering to tear up all the menus. Guests can create their own prix-fixe ensembles, request smaller portions, order by the glass, choose from the wine cellar. (Yes, yes, yes, and yes.) I settle on a creamy pike tartare with caviar and crustacean mousse, followed by a salad of grouper and oyster emulsion, and then an absurdly clever medley of cod – all this frutti di mare and not an ocean in sight – before shifting gears to a spaghetti with black truffles and foie gras, climaxing with a venison fillet in a crust of porcini mushrooms. And then dessert.
But well before the gustatory carpet bombing is complete, a tall man in white materializes at my table. With a knowing smile, chef Norbert Niederkofler asks, “Would you like to see my kitchen?”
From the surface of his wood-burning stove he lifts a pot and digs into it with a wooden spoon. He ladles the contents onto a small plate. I taste. Risotto with dwarf-pine pesto.
I’ve arrived.
THE DOLOMITES ARE A rogue alpine cluster of carbonate monoliths, throwbacks from the Triassic period 250 million years ago. Roughly equidistant from Milan to the southwest and Venice to the southeast, they’re an unmistakable spectacle, rising up from Italy’s spine like a prehistoric dorsal fin. At heights reaching nearly 11,000 feet, the massifs loom over the country’s most pristine valleys, including renowned vineyards and parklands teeming with roe deer, chamois goats, and pike. Equal proportions of Italian, Austrian, and Ladin (an ancient mountain community with its own language) cultural influences inhabit the Dolomites. So do Italy’s jet set, skiers, and mountaineers. Correspondingly, the region enjoys a greater density of upper-end hotels and restaurants than any other rural swath in il Bel Paese. It’s paradise for anyone who believes, as I do, that physical exertion by day should always be rewarded with gluttony by night – and that staring at natural beauty counts as physical exertion.
Many people come to the Dolomites for the sole purpose of skiing, and they surely have a swell time. Cortina d’Ampezzo – the site of the 1956 Winter Olympics – boasts 70 miles of ski slopes by itself, some cresting at nearly two miles, with a network of lifts affording stupendous views of well-blanketed valleys. But I’ve been here three times now, and what I’ve concluded is that the holy trinity of Italian pastimes – eating, drinking, and basking in beauty – is practiced in the Dolomites in spectacular fashion. That’s enough for me.
The skiers and I are in agreement about one thing: Though dazzling and more accessible to hikers in the warmer months, the Dolomites are hauntingly beautiful when draped in snow. The timbered villages radiate coziness. Things move quietly, slowly – and in my case, not at all. I’m more than content to spend my mornings sipping coffee from my hotel balcony, watching the skiers file out for the lifts on the outskirts of San Cassiano. I’m easily accommodated by Rosa Alpina’s staff (and often by the owners themselves, the handsomely refined Pizzinini family), who arrange for me to taste the pungent regional cheeses at family-run Lüch da Pcëi and then to raid the hotel’s wine cellar for a customized degustazione in the sunny tasting room. (The exalted lagreins notwithstanding, this is a zone for memorable cool-climate whites: riesling, pinot bianco, sauvignon blanc, and blends such as Terlan’s Nova Domus and Alois Lageder’s Tannhammer.) I migrate with my book from lobby fireplace to subterranean Jacuzzi to the nap-inducing plushness of my bed – after which I’m miraculously hungry again.
A mile down the road from Rosa Alpina is La Siriola, a legendary restaurant run by the Wiesers – who, like their blood relatives the Pizzininis, often dress in Ladin mountainwear and look as if they’ve never lived an unhealthy minute in their lives. Like St. Hubertus, La Siriola (“the nightingale”), with its piney interior and postmodern-looking breadsticks, proves that elegance needn’t be stuffy. I settle in for another staggering meal consisting of things I’ve never seen before nor will again: hay soup with olive powder, chicory salad with tandoori shrimp and mayonnaise, skewers of escargot, braised eel with pine needles (though not, I’m told, of the dwarf variety).
The short and scruffy-bearded chef, Claudio Melis, is making the rounds. When he arrives at my table, I ask the ever-grinning Claudio why the region is such a fountainhead of creativity. His answer is fittingly counterintuitive. “It’s because we don’t have much to work with,” Claudio says. “What do we have here that grows in abundance? Potatoes. Hay. That’s it. In Sicily, all of the ingredients – tomatoes, basil, olives – are so wonderful that the chefs just stick to the basics. They have to, or their clientele will get upset because they’re bastardizing a classic dish. Here in the Dolomites, we have to be inventive.”
Though the standard Tyrolean cuisine found in the Dolomites – speck (cured, smoked ham), game such as boar and venison, pastas like canederli (dumplings) and casunziei (beet-filled ravioli topped with powdered poppy seeds), and apfelstrudel – is quite wonderful, it’s not exactly light fare, and the portions usually presuppose that you’ve just come off a weeklong hunger strike. The gourmet restaurants, in contrast, aren’t just easier on the system – they’re also a steal compared to the fine-dining establishments of Rome, Venice, or Milan.
On the morning I check out of Rosa Alpina, bound for the famous Dolomites resort town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, chef Norbert instructs me to come to his kitchen one last time. He reaches into a refrigerator and hands me a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. “Just use a little at a time,” he says of the dwarf-pine pesto – which, a week later, I serve at a Washington, D.C., dinner party, after first e-mailing Norbert and asking him how the heck I’m supposed to cook with the stuff. “Try it on top of smoked pike, and serve it with that bottle of Nova Domus you bought from us” is his answer. The dinner guests are suitably dazzled. Grazie mille, Norbert.
THE DRIVE FROM SAN Cassiano to Cortina d’Ampezzo is a mere 17 miles. But it’s an epic trek, one that begins in the rustic Ladin provinces of the Alta Badia and – after traversing peaks that exceed 10,000 feet – ultimately deposits you at one of Italy’s most cosmopolitan getaways.
Cortina is a corkscrew of a town, descending into Corso Italia, an ever-crowded promenade girdled by a succession of posh boutiques. The day I arrive, the pedestrian street is a silvery sheet of ice. A sign on the door of the lovely sunlit Church of Madonna della Difesa points out that the heavy snowfall has configured itself above the portal in the shape of a dove – “an omen of peace for this community.”
The Cristallo Palace Hotel & Spa sits well above the town, a grand Winter Palace of a structure that for the past century has attended to the caprices of kings, beatniks, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank Sinatra – and now a well-fed American journalist. There’s no Ladin mountainwear in the Cristallo, but neither is there any snootiness in evidence as the cheerful receptionist leads me to a spacious, ornately lit bedroom with a jetted tub I would be tempted to use if I hadn’t already gotten a glimpse of the hotel’s Wellness Centre. That’s where I spend the afternoon, the monotony of the stair-climber banished by the view onto the snow-streaked crags of Mount Tofana and Mount Cristallo, which pulse like lunar rocks with the ritual crash of the sun.
That night, after a fine meal of veal and canederli in the Cristallo’s candlelit Tyrolean dining room, I take the half-mile downhill stroll into town. Purple lights twinkle on a distant bridge. Tomorrow morning, when the shops open, Corso Italia will resemble a fashion runway of full-length furs and conspicuously tanned faces, and the air will be thick with Ciao! and Buona giornata! At this hour, though, the predominant sound is that of icy water from the mountains hissing down a stone pathway. Storefront mannequins stand vigil over the luminous promenade, nearly empty except for an unleashed basset hound jubilantly blundering through the snow while somewhere behind him a voice pleads, “Hugo! Vieni, Hugo!”
After some late-night window-shopping, I duck into Enoteca Cortina, the town’s oldest wine bar. The men – and it’s only men, none of them remotely chichi – stand in animated clusters, their hands describing opinions of operatic intensity. I settle in, motion for a glass of lagrein. Before long, a few of them swivel to me, wanting to know about my new president. After a few paragraphs in my passable Italian, I change the subject: Mi piace molto la cucina di questa zona – sopratutto il pino mugo. E’ lo massimo!
They laugh appreciatively, loving that I love dwarf pine. A bottle is called for. The night’s just beginning.
BUT THE MOUNTAINS KEEP calling until finally I go to them. It’s ten degrees on a Saturday morning as I drive through San Vigilio di Marebbe, a town so exquisite it should be encased in a domed paperweight. Beyond the village, a little roadway of pure ice stretches for eight miles, until it dead-ends at a parking lot. There’s a small bar where I knock back an espresso before slipping on my snowshoes. Then I hit the trail, which goes straight up, into the snaggled teeth of the Dolomites.
The sky is a searing azure. Gigantic crystal blue icicles dangle like whiskers from the mountain faces, which themselves turn pinkish in the sun. The switchbacks are steep, and I’m treading a six-inch cushion of snow. But when I pause after a half hour to catch my breath, at a bend affording an endless vista of rolling whiteness, what I hear is a silence that is absolute.
A little over two miles into what will be a ten-mile round-trip hike, the trail at last flattens. It’s then that I hear a scudding noise. A cross-country skier, the first human I’ve seen since I left the bar, glides up to me. We trade nationalities – he’s Belgian – and then cameras.
“You’re heading to the mountain hut?” he asks, referring to the rustic high-altitude café another two miles down the snowy road.
Truthfully, I’d contemplated giving up halfway. But when I say, “Sure,” and he says, “I’ll look for you there” and swishes off, my mouth is suddenly alive with the smoky taste of speck that will reward my labor. When I start trudging again, a solitary figure in a wintry postcard, I’m reminded that the reward is already in my grasp.
Dolomites Essentials
Everything you need for a getaway in the land of dwarf-pine pesto.
Getting There
Lufthansa Airlines offers flights from numerous U.S. cities to Venice and Innsbruck; from either it’s a two-hour drive to Cortina d’Ampezzo and San Cassiano. A word to the wise: Although the mountain roads are well tended, avoid driving them on icy winter nights.
Hotel & Spa Rosa Alpina in San Cassiano is the epitome of country elegance, with 51 handsome wood Tyrolean-bedecked rooms (including several sleek new suites), a spa, an indoor pool and solarium, and two restaurants, situated in the heart of town. Doubles from $508, including breakfast and a bottle of wine.
Cristallo Palace Hotel & Spa, perched high over Cortina d’Ampezzo, is a gleaming eagle’s nest of an inn, with 74 rooms (22 of them suites possessing Venetian grandeur) and a peerless subterranean wellness complex. Its bar and restaurant offer some of the finest mountain views anywhere in Italy. Doubles from $493, including breakfast, a welcome cocktail, and one treatment at the spa.
At Hotel Rosa Alpina’s St. Hubertus in San Cassiano, Norbert Niederkofler expertly fuses indigenous cuisine with contemporary Mediterranean. Strada Micura de Rü 20; 39-471/849-500.
Nearby, Claudio Melis of La Siriola is equally fearless, imparting Asian and even Mexican touches to his creations. Strada Prè de Vi 31; 39-471/849-445.
Also in San Cassiano, the Crazzolara family at Lüch da Pcëi makes wonderful local cheeses that can be bought over the counter or shipped back to the States. Strada Pecei 17; 39-471/849-286.
An hour north of San Cassiano, about two miles west of Falzes, Schöneck is a raffish culinary beacon well known to the locals, run with flawless attentiveness by the Baumgartner brothers. Via Castello Schöneck 11; 39-474/565-550; www.schoeneck.it.
A 70-minute drive east of Cortina d’Ampezzo brings you to the exquisite resort town of Sappada and to Laite, the Dolomites’ most romantic dining spot and one of the best values of any Michelin-star restaurant around. Housed in a 300-year-old cottage, Laite features immaculately conceived game and seafood, paired with the great wines of the neighboring Friuli region. Via Hoffe 10; 39-435/469-070; www.ristorantelaite.com.