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Amandola: Il Casolare

via Angelo Biondi 105 , Phone: 0736.848755

Closing day: Wednesday, Thursday

Reviewed by: David from NY, review #1312

When: 2005

New, good trattoria that's part of a B&B right outside of Amandola.

Directions: 1/2 km out of Amandola on the road towards Montefortino - on the left side before you reach the cemetery (well, hopefully, at least.....)

When in a new town, I always try to ask locals (merchants, etc.) for restaurant recommendations. We went to Il Casolare on the recommendation of a greengrocer whose store we went to a number of times. It didn't disappoint. We were just about the only diners on a Tues eve in early June. There were a couple of family members/friends in the main dining room watching TV too loudly. We at first asked them to lower the volume, which they kindly did. Later, when someone else moved into that room, the volume was jacked up again - so we just took the initiative to close the door in between the two rooms so we could have a nice, peaceful meal.

Good, traditional antipasto platter, 2 very large, and very good primi (again, have restaurants in Italy recently beefed up their pasta portions all'Americana? I hope not, although we did encounter more than just a couple of restaurants where the portions were just too big -- "what's up with that?") - very good bucatini all'amatriciana (I think this is a Roman dish - it was a nice change from the typical Marche regional pastas we'd been having - and a good tagliatelle con funghi (although there was a little too much oil in it, but still quite good). Mixed grill - very nice and, as a contorno (??), olivi all'ascolana, which were good, but a bit on the heavy side - lemon helped. I thought it was strange that deep fried, stuffed olives were served as a contorno. Hm... perhaps my concept of what a contorno should be - side vegetable or salad - is too narrow.

We ordered two excellent bottles of Rosso Piceno from their very reasonable wine list. The Ciù Ciù 2003 Rosso Piceno Superiore was really terrific. (I was amused because of the English cognate "Choo Choo" - for that reason I wanted it to be good wine. It didn't disappoint - evidently they're one of the very good producers in Marche!)

I don't remember how much the bill was, but this trattoria was in line with the others in the area -- quite reasonable, and by Tuscan standards, downright inexpensive!

This review is the opinion of a Slow Travel member and not of slowtrav.com.

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Amandola: Il Casolare

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