Italy: Pasta Greatness at All’Osteria Bottega

All’Osteria Bottega
51 Via Santa Caterina
Bologna, Italy

If there is an item that should be on an Italian food lover’s bucket list, it should be eating bolognese sauce in Bologna. Delicately cured bits of meat rounded together in an exquisitely, simply complex sauce, Bolognese (or just ragu, as the locals would call it) symbolizes everything that we love about Italian cooking: high quality, lovingly-prepared ingredients that, when treated well, speak for themselves. Such is the case at All’Osteria Bottega, a tiny restaurant outside of Bologna’s historic center where we went to check that elusive item off M’s bucket list, and sample some other winning dishes in the process.

If you are lucky enough to get one of the 20 seats in All’Osteria Bottega’s tiny seating room, you’ll be greeted by one of the pleasant waitstaff or the delightfully gregarious owner, who will fly between you and the other patrons while engaging in lively chat the whole time. If only we spoke Italian! We could have made a new culinary friend. Not that we aren’t up for making friends with the other inanimate objects in the place: legs of prosciutto, salame, mortadella, cheeses galore, and the giant red meat slicer that dominates the back counter. We wanted to take it home, along with a prosciutto leg or two.

Italians always seem to know how to enjoy a meal. The dress classy for food outings, and they make long affairs of it, ordering plate after plate of prosciutto, cheese, pasta, a main course, wine, dessert, and a coffee. But, unfortunately, we were on a flight layover and in a time crunch: still in our t-shirts and polos (under dressed by Italian standards), we stuck to our main goal: the pasta. M ordered the tagliatelle with bolognese ragu, and L ordered the surprise winner of the evening: tortelli, stuffed with ricotta cheese and served in a light sage cream sauce.

Tagliatelle with ragu bolognese, topped with parmiggiano-reggiano.

This, right here, could have been made by the world’s greatest grandmother, out of the pot she had been using since the ill-fated Mussolini administration. And maybe it was. The mistake so many people make with bolognese ragu is that they make it into too much of a sauce – it slathers over the pasta, dominating it, and the flavors in the meat get bogged down in oil that simply isn’t needed. At Bottega, there is no oil, no liquid in this sauce. Just a series of different meat cuts, ground down to perfection and served delicately integrated into the tagliatelle. You can taste each and every morsel of flavor, all the different textures that went into the ragu, and it just lets you savor each bite that much more. Yet while the sauce was brilliant, the pasta was actually a bit of a disappointment: maybe a thirty seconds or so undercooked, a little less al dente would have made all the difference and really let the sauce (in addition to the parmigiano-reggiano, grated in person!) absolutely shine.

Ricotta tortelli in a sage cream sauce

The same mild criticism of the pasta could not be said for L’s dish, tortelli stuffed with ricotta and served in sage cream sauce. “Little clouds of angelic cheesy goodness” she calls them. Ricotta can come out, especially in tortelli, far too grainy – a product of poor cooking techniques or not using fresh cheese. Not the case here: the oh-so smooth tortelli were stuffed with a ricotta that was extremely smooth; lighter and fluffier than any other ricotta cheese filling she had ever tasted. The sage cream sauce was a perfect complement, providing just the right flavor contrast and letting the great ricotta and its texture steal the show.

A brilliant meal complete for only 30 euro, and then it was off to the center of Bologna to explore an area of food stores founded nearly one thousand years ago that many consider Italy’s best.