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Perugia: La Lanterna

Via U. Rocchi 6 , Phone: 075-572-6397

Reviewed by: Jeff Whiteaker from Slovakia, review #3840

When: 2011

Overall, La Lanterna was a bit of an improvement over some other places we tried in Perugia, and while it wasn't bad, I wouldn't recommend it enthusiastically.

Distraught over the maddeningly inconsistent dinners we'd had the previous two nights in Perugia, we did some more research and saw several recommendations for La Lanterna (which was touted by both NY Times and some travel guides as being one of the better restaurants in town). We'd walked by La Lanterna the previous night and saw that it was packed with seemingly happy diners, so we thought we'd give it a try.

For antipasti, we had liver pate crostini which were pretty tasty, and a salad of radicchio, shavings of cheese, and black truffle pate, which had potential but suffered from over-salting. We decided to take a break from pasta and we ordered two secondi: a veal with a black truffle shavings and sauce, and this thing called lombetto crosto con crema di porcini e tartufo, which was basically very tender pork that had been baked in dough, then sliced and slathered in a comforting, rich sauce. Surprisingly, the veal from the previous night’s place (the otherwise tacky and bad Il Settimo Sigillo) was better (more tender and flavorful). And while the lombetto was definitely tasty, the porcini and truffle flavors really didn’t come through. If those flavors hadn't been listed in the description on the menu, we wouldn't have even detected them by tasting the thing. The house red was decent enough.

On the whole it seemed like better-presented and better-prepared food than our previous two nights in Perugia (and the ambience was nicer, too), but still no life-altering experience. At this point, I was starting to give up hope of ever finding a truly fabulous (from start to finish) meal in Perugia.

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

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Perugia: La Lanterna

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