Here’s one for all you people wanting a great dining experience in Marbella .
I had booked a table by email a week earlier at Skina, a small restaurant in the Old Town area of Marbella serving new wave Andalusian to a maximum of 14 customers every night.
The tiny dining room is elegant without the faux formality that is found in many restaurants promising ‘fine dining’ along this coastline.
We were warmly welcomed at the door by name, Marco, a young, smart professional offered us a complimentary glass of local Cava while we scanned the menu.
Dainty hand made breadsticks and some kind of large crispbreads with black onion seeds were presented in a very heavy oblong of marble with grooves for the crispbreads (similar to the Italian ‘Mother in Law’s tongues’) and a hole filled with a dip made from pork fat and smoked paprika.
The 4 of us went for the Tasting menu at 48.50 euro a head and we started with a recommended bottle of very nice dry white (Do Ferreiro, 25 euro).
I could go on about this excellent meal so I will.
The cooking was precise modern Spanish with tons of flavour; Marco, one of 2 staff in the room, asked where we were from and it turned out he had worked with 2 friends of mine, Tony and Olga of Anthony’s in Leeds at El Bulli in Roses, talk about small world!
We had a procession of dishes, all memorable and 3 bottles of wine including a red at 35 euros (Finca Valpiedra – ‘scuse me for the lack of wine info but alcohol, visual and taste overload made me miss things in my surreptitiously scribbled notes We finished the meal with a digestif similar to grappa and the bill came to 350 euro.
This was the menu degustacion.
Gazpacho served in chilled test tubes and topped with some crystallised stuff (cucumber? Olive oil? not sure)
Fois gras with yoghurt 3 ways (mousse, crunchy niblets, cream) and honey.
Tuna with different raw and cooked textures, micro cucumber, avruga caviar, sweet cucumber salad.
A bronze shiny cube of oxtail with tomato, apricot and soft rocks of olive oil. (Gill has the first of her many er…hot flushes of pleasure.
Sea bass in high tech plastic bag (en papillotte) with samphire, cherry tomato, fine veg, crispy seaweed? – served in a china hat.
Smoked prawn fritters.
Iberian Pork with candied aubergine, vincotto, blood sausage? and crispy vegetable stuff. The pork looked like a piece of rare beef fillet- dark red and oozing a little blood/juice, however it was pork neck muscle, cooked at low temperature for a long time. The quality of the meat was absolutely exceptional and swoonfully delicious.
I warn Gill who is veering towards a ‘when Harry met Sally’ scene.
An illuminated glass cube that gently changed colour was a pedestal for a bowl of crumbly chocolate, ‘frogspawn’ of violet, apricot mousse in a round skin, crispy sweet bits (unidentified) and soft little cubes redolent of yoghurt.
Chocolate graffiti – 4 ways with chocolate included choc ice jigsaw, balsamic choc mousse and some eucalyptus granita.
We thought it was all over and were outside having a smoke and digestif when another dish/not dish arrived.
Egg custard cube, chocolate with a suspicion of curry and a pot of red fruit fool with raspberries .
Flippin ‘eck it’s just a raspberry.
Are you sure?
Is there something in it?
Nope, just a raspberry – how nice to finish the last mouthful with something unreconstructed..
So, that was dinner at Spina. We all thought it the best meal we have enjoyed on the Costa del Sol. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly unpretentious and casual.
It will be interesting to see how these young restaurateurs get on in the future.

Our Sicilian regional evenings start next week and always bring out the bittersweet 'melancolia' in me that people with Sicilian blood seem to be afflicted with.

You could call it the' Mediterranean Blues' and given the close proximity of Africa, the spiritual rural birthplace of the art form and visible on a clear day, you can see why.

For an in depth personal view of Sicily and its food you can go to an earlier posting entitled 'Memories of Palagonia' .

In our continuing quest to find great dining experiences in Italy, me and Bro’ John found ourselves driving to Bra in Piedmont with ‘Zeppe and Ian from Salvo’s. Bra is the birthplace of the Slow Food Movement and prides itself on its culinary heritage with restaurants, food shops and all manner of things epicurean to enjoy.

Below are a couple of places we particularly enjoyed.

Albergo Cantine Ascheri

‘What differences are there between this Gavi we are drinking bearing your Mothers name on the label and the shelves of wine at half the price in the supermarket down the street? I asked cheekily.
Matteo Ascheri, who runs the hotel, winery, vineyard and Osteria with his family smiled benignly and replied ‘One is a drink and the other is wine’. Ouch, Round one to Mat.

This hotel opened in 2005 over the winery of the Ascheri Family, winemakers in the region since the 1800’s. The design, by family friend and architect Marco Poncellini is very modern in a post industrial style with references to the surrounding countryside, mountains and vineyards throughout the building with the use of wood, iron, earthy tones and even glass walls on the outside with earth from each of the 3 vineyards they cultivate. There are cheeky touches like spy hole telescopes in the walls of the rooms focused on the snowy Alps and interesting structures in the distance.
The place is an absolute delight throughout with helpful and courteous staff; I loved the amazing breakfasts where you can try the raw Bra sausage and unpasteurised cheeses as well as superbly cooked breakfasts, home made cakes, preserves and sweet things or freshly churned alpine butter on fresh baked bread.

The rooms are modern and individual with original furnishings and an eye to detail throughout; a library stuffed with books about wine, food and Piedmonte history makes it easy to relax for an hour and immerse yourself in the folklore of the region.
The staff are happy to arrange a visit to the wine making and bottling facility below, which you can glimpse through various windows cut into the floor of the public area.

If you are planning a trip to sample the bounty of this proud culinary area, with Alba, Barolo, Asti and the like close by you could not find a better base for your adventure.

Osteria Murivecchi
Via G. Piumati 19. Bra 12042
0172 431008
A bonus of staying at the hotel is this rustic restaurant on the site of the
original Ascheri winery in the courtyard of the grounds which is highly regarded in the area.

Booking is recommended as the 4 atmospheric dining rooms were all pretty full when we arrived; you can see that the same attention to detail found in the hotel is applied here too.

Antipasti were served from a table in the dining room; the raw ‘Salsicche di Bra’ are a local specialty sausage made from minced veal or young beef and a little pancetta and are very good, an unusual cooked salami was also superb, the flavour faintly redolent of mortadella, a specialty of Emilio Romagna down the road. More salami, dressed raw salmon, soft biscuits topped with robbiola and grapes and a salad of tuna, apple and fennel followed.
From the daily blackboard (the only menu available) we tried a couple of pasta dishes each - risotto with pancetta and prunes and some tagliatelle with sausage and porcini. The region is very much a meat loving area and I was still coming to terms with our earlier lunch in the Alps so I followed with a plate of sauté artichoke hearts while the guys had a spezzatino of pork with meat on the bone.
A soft crème Catalan affair followed, the sugar crust still burning as it arrived at the table along with a cake, served with a yoghurt cream, made from the regions exalted hazelnuts ( Matteo Ascheri later informed us that, as well as the vines, they also grew corn and hazelnuts but I didn’t ask).
We enjoyed wine from the Ascheri cellars; both the Langhe Arneis and the Gavi bearing the name of Matriarch Christina Ascheri and together with a single vineyard Dolcetto d’Alba were all polished off with gusto as usual.

If dining out is about a discreet casual and refined atmosphere that promotes conviviality with professional friendly service and simply cooked seasonal produce of the territory by cooks who can really cook at a fair price then this ticks all the boxes not only as a first class dining experience but as one of the longest sentences I have ever written. Phew.

Before lunch we planned to visit the food market in Cuneo then on to Castelmagno, not a town but a loose collective of hamlets, villages and farms where some of Italy’s great cheeses are produced.

The market is well worth a visit with many cheeses and salume on display as well as fish stalls and game stands amongst the usual colourful riot of Italian vegetable merchants. You may hear French voices in your head. This is not because you have contracted some virulent form of mad cow disease from all the meat you have eaten but because many Frenchies come over the border to the market. Zoot Alors! Italian stuff is er… tres bon innit.

On our way to Castelmagno the morning mist and cloud disappeared as the majestic Alps were slowly illuminated by the sun breaking through providing us with a fantastic backdrop to our trip.

Before lunch we found ourselves 1700 metres above sea level visiting local cheese maker Carla Occelli. She acquired these premises high in the Alps to mature (la stagionatura) her cheeses in the most perfect conditions of temperature (4-6C) and humidity (80-85%).
In a cool, cavelike room she ages Castelmagno, the regions specialty, along with Raschiera, Bra tenero, Bra duro, Toma Piedmontese and Robbiola. She only uses milk from cows on pastures over 600 metres above sea level and
drives 90 km twice a week to turn the cheeses over.
The Castelmagno cheese takes 6 days to make and is aged 3-4 months before being sold on to local wholesalers and cheese shops. Carla’s total annual production is 3000 pieces so only a very few of these firm, slightly crumbly ‘almost blue’ tasting cheeses find their way to the U.K.

We made our way a little further up the mountain road for lunch at the ‘Regina delle Alpi’ restaurant situated by the Sanctuary of S.Magno.

The specialties in this charming albeit slightly old fashioned place are gnocchi with Castelmagno cheese, crispy fried trout with genepi, a local alpine herb and game. Before trying all the dishes including a rich venison stew cooked in red wine and cloves with beautiful buttered wild spinach (thick stemmed, firm and tender) the owner/cook brought out some antipasti. The frittata used only stuff from the area, except for the leeks, he explained; wild spinach, nettles, mint and sunflower made this a lovely slice of green. We also ate roasted peppers with bagna cauda- an oily anchovy based sauce that was delicious and a vol au vent with the pungent Castelmagno cheese which becomes strong and blue tasting when cooked.

We finished with local cheese and honey followed by coffee and a digestive liqueur made from ginepy which was very interesting!
The prices in this rural idyll are cheap, the few menu dishes are vaguely scrawled on a piece of card as you enter and the 7 wines, all from Luigi Penna and sons in Alba have the prices in marker on the free brochures from the vineyard. Give me honestly priced food rather than fancy stationary any day.
It is worth visiting this simply run Trattoria for the views alone but the food is honest, value for money, territorial and well cooked.

Regina delle Alpi, Santuario S.Magno, Castelmagno,
0171 986366.