Epic "vignarola" and amazing pork offal beans. From Risulta to Perugia, we devoured everything (with great pleasure)

Risulta is currently one of the most interesting addresses in Perugia. Fine dining? No, it's simply a place where you eat well, with dishes executed to perfection, with a carefully curated wine list where you can discover distant flavors that are still linked to our taste memory. It is part of a group of restaurants that we could define - with poetic license - "Ottolenghian", from Yotam Assaf Ottolenghi, a British-Israeli chef and restaurateur, whose book Simple stands prominently on Risulta's central counter, which serves as a storage place for fresh fruits and vegetables, so small is the kitchen.

History of Risulta in Perugia

"It was a bar and we adapted it with what we found," explain Riccardo Murtas and Valentina Urciuoli, the two souls of the project, both professionally raised in the kitchen of Osteria del Posto, just outside Perugia. "You saw the book there because I was reading it, and I'm messy," admits Valentina, who had some experience in London in 2016. "At that time in London, Ottolenghi was very popular, and I brought with me two principles of that type of cuisine: attention to vegetables, which we care incredibly about, also for clearly ethical reasons, which also pleases the customers, vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike; we are taking a slice of the market forgotten in Umbria. And the predisposition to sharing dishes prepared with relatively simple and replaceable ingredients. Can we say that Ottolenghi is the Peppe Guida of London?" Let's say it. "Anyway, when we opened in June 2022, we wanted to do something that resembled us more, that could follow the mood of the chefs, where there were fewer rules, fewer canons. We wanted a more lively place, but by subtraction," they explain.

The restaurant where everything is homemade

Indeed, Risulta features technique and thought, but simplicity, immediacy, and informality complete the picture (and there are plenty of paintings hanging on the walls here). "It's a place that has ultimately become part of the customers' daily lives, where they can have dinner spending even 25 euros, including a glass of wine, a more livable place even for us chefs," not so much in terms of days off (they are the usual two days in the low season, which become one in the high season) but in terms of hours. "From the beginning, the basic idea was not to do everything ourselves, for example, we buy bread and fresh pasta from nearby artisans who make their products better than we could. Working fewer hours 'cutting' everything we don't need to do here: this way, we make the kitchen compatible with other needs of existence." Moreover, by doing so, they promote virtuous artisanal realities, for example, for bread, they rely on the excellent Ora Forneria in Bastia Umbra.

What do you eat at Risulta in Perugia?

But what do you eat? The menu changes weekly and includes about fifteen dishes (including "Niccherie", or delights, "those desires, those lustful desires"), you would try them all. We tried almost all of them. Impossible to give up the pasta croquettes with ham and peas, as well as the chicken croquette with saffron mayonnaise. Perfect cooking for spaghetti with rigaji, mint, and pecorino, just creamy enough, without succumbing to trends, just as they certainly do not succumb to trends with the "Etruscan Roast Beef" (one of their suppliers is Etrusco Carni) or the lung in goulash. And then the vegetable dishes, from the "epic" vignarola, truly epic, to the roasted Margherita onions with agretti, from the crispy spinach beans with yogurt to the chickpea flatbread, sautéed herb, and fricassee sauce. Special mention for the "sporchetti" beans, with pork feet and ears. "Residual materials are those that remain at the end of a construction site and are then reused for the next construction site, sometimes changing their characteristics. This is what residual cooking is, it's a pretty political act."

Eating has to do with pleasure

Even the red walls and the paintings hanging openly manifest their political creed. "It's a 'partisan' choice, apologies to the partisans for invoking them, even not wanting to cook the fillet in favor of meatballs, to give everyone the opportunity to indulge in a dinner out. The idea behind Risulta is that eating is a powerful gesture, it has to do with pleasure and doesn't necessarily have to be intellectualized. Perhaps it's also a bit of our flashy spirit talking!" The Manifesto of Marx next to the cash register, Ugo Tognazzi's The Big Feast among other books on one of the shelves, the image of Sora Lella with Che Guevara's hat, or the photo of one of the protagonists of this story in the pool, just like that. Speaking of protagonists, the other actors in this collective story are Luca Buccioni, Damiano Rizzo, and Elena Pianegiani, the first in the kitchen and the other two in the dining room, interchangeable when it comes to bringing ideas. And what ideas.