The Common Man Takes Diners on a Tour of Italy

Looking to escape the cold for a while? Take a trip someplace warmer this winter without travelling outside New Hampshire—the folks at Lago are offering a 20-week Tour of Italy that will spice up your life and bring you a taste of Europe in your own backyard!

Starting this week and going through the end of May, Chef Thomas Faba of Lago at Bay Point is showcasing a menu of three-course dinners that changes each week, highlighting dishes unique to one of the 20 regions of Italy. The special menu will also offer wines from each region to accompany the meal. The Tour of Italy dinners will be available Monday – Thursday for $24.95 per person, exclusive of tax and gratuity.

This week, the featured region was Toscana, also known as Tuscany, and the meal included “Ribollita” bread soup, “Cachuccio,” which is sautéed squid with potatoes, olives, and fresh chili peppers, and “Buccellato,” a raisin and anise seed cake with strawberries. For this coming week, the chef will be taking guests to Liguria, with a menu of “Zucca Frittella” Pumpkin fritters, “Coniglio,” a Genoa-style braised rabbit, and “Pesca Linguria” stuffed peaches with cream.

Guests who “visit” 12 or more regions will receive a complimentary ticket to Lago’s End of the Tour Wine Dinner on June 6^th, and can keep track of their dinner adventures with a “passport” that is stamped by their servers each time they try the chef’s Tour menu.

“We’ve had a very, very good response the first week, better than anticipated,” says Sean Brown, General Manager of Lago. He explains that this is the first time the restaurant has done an event like this. “It’s interesting,” he says. “With 20 different regions in Italy that all have fairly distinct characteristics of the food that they serve . . . we have about 20 weeks that are fairly quiet, so it seemed to be a very good, natural fit.” The team at Lago is confident that at this time of year, many guests are open to getting out and trying something new.

“Chef Faba has Italian heritage—he comes from an Italian family,” says Sean, “and our company chef for The Common Man Family, our director of culinary operations, Roland von Gunten, has a fairly extensive Italian background. Being from Switzerland, a large part of his formal culinary training was in Italian food, so he was certainly instrumental in creating the menus as well.”

For the End of the Tour Wine Dinner in June, the chef will plan the menu based on guest feedback over the weeks. Says Sean, “We’re going to see what the best responses are, to which regions, which ones seem to be the most popular, what flavors our guests like the most . . . and as we get a little bit closer, we will draw up a menu that pulls from our guests’ favorite areas.”

Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to explore the cuisine and wines of Italy’s distinct regions. Taking a culinary tour of Italy is the next best thing to actually being there! For more information, visit the Common Man’s website and check out the calendar, or just come to Meredith and enjoy a dinner at Lago to get your tour started. Mangia!

Carrie Reed
The Mill Falls Blogging Team