Luigino's Falkland

On fire

Regular readers may have spotted my interest in woodfired ovens.

There's something about that particular type of heat that imparts a unique character to anything cooked in it. Pain Poilâne, the world's most celebrated loaf, owes much to the use of wild yeast and long fermentation, but its archaic wood-firing is also a vital part of its success.

On the continent and throughout the Middle East, wood-fired ovens are still quite common. You're walking along a street and that haunting, come-hither aroma insinuates itself into your nostrils. Pizza, bread, spit-roasted meat, blistered aubergines . . . all of them emerge from the hot tiles and smouldering logs with a special quality they didn't have when they went in.

The best wood oven I ever saw was at Fattoria Pulcino, outside Montepulciano in Tuscany, previously reviewed in these columns, where a wiry old man, stripped to the waist, worked away at the maws of a feudal wood-fired oven that was the size of a ship's furnace. The design of these ovens hasn't changed much over the centuries, but recently, as I have reported, there's a positive spate of modern, sanitised "wood-fired ovens" that are barely even plausible imitations of the real thing turning up in chi-chi hotels and "style" eateries. So when I heard that Luigino's in Falkland had something described as a wood-fired oven, I didn't get too excited.

Blow me, but as I walked into Luigino's, my nostrils began to twitch. I followed it past the hotel and the bar, through the smart, cosmopolitan Italian food shop to the back of the restaurant and into the kitchen where I found myself looking at a domed stone oven, not totally dissimilar to the 16th-century one that sits in the kitchens of Falkland Palace, just across the road.

Don't you just love Italians? No mucking about with prissy compromises. Not only is Luigino's oven crackling away, there's a smouldering fire in an open grate warming up its shop, and, from the bar, you can look through a glass wall to see where Luigino's makes its own fresh pasta. I'm impressed.

It's still making me salivate thinking about my pizza bianca, that is to say a "white" pizza, made without tomato sugo. It's my favourite pizza and this one was exemplary. The crust was crisp and dry with puffy little blisters, yeasty and pliable within.

A milky mozzarella had more or less dissolved all over it, trapping shredded basil leaves and sweet cherry tomatoes, the latter ever so slightly singed by the hot smoke. I lose interest in most pizzas before I get through a quarter. This one I ate to the very end, rolling it up in my fingers.

A good lasagne is a seductive dish. At Luigino's they do it rather well. It was thick with layers of home-made egg pasta, well-lubricated with bechamel sauce and topped with a dollop of very Italian meat ragu, more finely minced than you get in the British rendition. Baked in the saintly oven, it was gratinated in an addictive way. Yet again, the whisper of wood smoke had kissed it, leaving a trail of flavour.

Luigino's also passes the risotto test with flying colours. Firm-centred, silky rice disclosed soft grey chunks of crumbled porky sausage meat, robustly seasoned with fennel and peppercorns in a risotto finished with Dolcelatte and Parmesan, and crowned with softly sweated pink onions. That staple dessert, Tiramisu, was not the usual timid boudoir biscuit and whipped cream affair but a convincingly Italian concoction, bitter with espresso, sweet with thin, Marsala-soaked sponge and rich with the sterilised milk flavour of Mascarpone.

Menu descriptions lack precision, however. The grilled aubergines, peppers and courgettes were meant to come with sheep's milk ricotta - a speciality of Sicily and Sardinia that makes the bovine equivalent seem vapid. Instead, I got a slice of very ordinary French goat log. A vanilla ice cream with those out-the-bottle, but nevertheless luscious, Amarena cherries was meant to have a quenelle of mascarpone, but didn't.

But the wines are interesting and very fairly priced. Plus the staff are marvellously Italian, serious young women who behave as though they just left the mother country the day before. Luigino's feels like being in Italy.

©Sunday Herald