Luca Abbruzzino triples his presence and opens Oltre in Lamezia Terme. When diners sat at the table, they found themselves surrounded by works of Andy Warhol: the restaurant, in fact, is located inside Palazzo Greco Stella, a building from the late 1800s in the historic center of Lamezia Terme (CZ) reborn as an exhibition space.
Once the residence of the Marquis Fiore-Serra, today it is a museum, bookshop, high craftsmanship shop, relais with 6 rooms, an American bar, bistro, and fine dining restaurant. According to a format that seems to be gaining more and more consensus – as in the case of the visionary place Luminist in Naples, inside the Gallerie d'Italia of Intesa San Paolo. Here, Pietro Greco and Elena Vera Stella are the architects of the rebirth of this space, following a project cherished for years that found in the Abbruzzino family the partner for the gastronomic part.
"Initially – Luca Abbruzzino recounts – we wanted to close in Catanzaro and move to Lamezia Terme." Logistically more important, "the gateway to Calabria" as the chef calls it, Lamezia with high-speed rail and the international airport offers a larger customer base. "Then we changed our minds." So today Luca triples his presence: at the historic venue of Cava-cuculera Nobile, and at Brezza in Soverato he adds this ambitious project that he personally oversees. In Catanzaro, his father Antonio and mother Rosetta remain, along with Antonio Fazio, Abbruzzino's longtime sous chef who is now the kitchen chef, and the entire brigade, with Luca continuing to oversee the restaurant in Catanzaro from Lamezia Terme. Here the chef – born in 1989 – among the leading figures of the Calabrian new wave, is at work with an ambitious project: fine dining, in fact, with only one 9-course tasting menu in the dark that changes often, "even daily if desired," is just one of the gastronomic lines. Alongside it is a bistro with market cuisine - 7 tables and about thirty covers in total – and the American bar, the only space open also for lunch. Oltre is the flagship and represents an evolution of the work done in Catanzaro, but with more audacity, confidently mixing historic dishes (such as spaghetti with red mullet sauce, 'nduja, turmeric, and orange) and things like curly sunchokes and umeboshi. They also push Beyond with the pairing: not only wines proposed by sommelier Luciano Tassoni (selected from a cellar with about 700 references, shared with the restaurant in Catanzaro), but also some cocktails, crafted by bartender Stefano Cosentino.
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