With Gatto Verde Bottura drops a poker

Gatto verde is many things, including a trattoria in Asso (Como) and another restaurant in Agliano Terme in the Asti region or a good place in Marina di Ravenna and a fourth one in Giovinazzo near Bari. Then there is the memory of Gatto Verde in Maranello where Enzo Ferrari used to take his family to lunch on Sundays. Then... then... then there’s the Gatto Verde of Massimo Bottura, Lara Gilmore and Jessica Rosval within the perimeter of Casa Maria Luigia in the countryside south of Modena. Its beauty bewitches and precisely for this reason the Modenese has good reason to remember that ‘Gatto Verde is an important figure in the Parisian Surrealism of the 1920s.’

We are almost there. On the 20^th of September, a Wednesday, the official opening to the public. The more urgent run-in is about to end, followed by a more spread-out one, in the presence of a paying public who will be able to choose between the à la carte and the tasting menu. However, it should also be pointed out that those who could sit there in the previous two weeks were served a menu for 140 euros.

In the centre is the fire, there are glowing embers and grills, there is a pizza oven that will not normally churn out pizzas, but bread and focaccia, but which will also be used for delicate smoking processes. There is a very logical thread and woe betide if on the 14^th of November, the day of the presentation of the Michelin Italia, edition number 69, Gatto Verde gets its first star. ‘It all starts with breakfast with the wood oven. Then the Sunday brunch, then the barbecue and finally, now, the restaurant. The race begins once again.’ Towards the stars, red and green, because sustainability here is a dogma, not just a fashionable word. Then the 50Best in Jessica Rosval's key (she’s Woman of the Year), and from there the establishment will climb the ranks, from 100 upwards, higher and higher.

Gatto Verde joins, in Modena alone, Osteria Francescana, Franceschetta 58 and Casa Maria Luigia, where Jessica has always followed the historic menu of Francescana, the flagship on Via Stella - a street with a prophetic name, by the way. Our unusually colourful kitten stands, gazing at the façade of the villa, all to left, hidden from view by several trees. You park and walk along the railing for a few metres, then turn right towards what used to be nothing and is now the garden overlooked by a vinegar cellar recently acquired and immediately renamed Acetaia Maria Luigia, over 1,200 barrels, several of them centuries old.

The same farmyard and what became a restaurant was, until late spring, the unused half of a double shed with a rectangular base, narrow and long, divided into four segments, also rectangular. Two of them were once the main ones and overlooked the fields. One housed the cars and motorbikes of the Bottura collection, the other hosted lunches, music and dancing. It is still like this, only that the two parts once ignored, now welcome Gatto Verde: on one side the kitchen entirely dedicated to fire, smoke and embers, on the other the tables. The view from the garden is to fall in love with, the rest is the food.

It is a continuous play on presences and appearances, on moving along lines that have to be imagined. The menu starts with a poem by Lara Gilmore written in English: "When the cat turns green, anything can happen./ The smoke rises and the wind rustles...". Two verses in Italian for everyone: "Let me vanish among the smoke rings of the mind (...) What taste is there, if not a smiling green cat?".

On the walls there are works by Mike Bidlo from the 1980s. They hint at Pollock and Warhol and are not fakes because the fact is obvious, stated, with a NOT preceding each title. Not Pollock, for example, which leads us to the cuisine where we have BBQ, NOT BBQ.

So there’s Not a Mussel because in truth it is a work around blue crab, pork belly and apple that reminds you erroneously of squid ink.

Then there’s the Borlengo of porcini water and 36-month Parmesan cheese; the Cotechino sangue di drago; the beef that on the journey from Montreal to San Damaso, a hamlet of Modena that hosts Casa Maria Luigia, turns from beef into lamb; the Pasta arsa cooked like a risotto and many other dreams and visions.

Jessica’s sous chef is Alessia Belladonna while Maria Cristina Messori is the dining room director, Denis Breta is the maître, Valentina Bardini the sommelier.

The grill is handcrafted by Tuscan company Universo (and not Spanish as fashion and quality would dictate), the wood-burning oven was forged in Modena, the lights are by Davide Groppi. There is the world, there is Italy, there are the souls and thoughts of many and many again. With a final note on the autumn opening: five evening services, from Wednesday to Sunday.