A warm welcome awaits you in this family restaurant near the Malpensa airport, with a classical dining hall where you can enjoy traditional cousine, choosing from the cart with roasts and boiled meats on week-days.
The MICHELIN Guide 2008
Who knows if you have never thought “Why a place should be called Malpensa?” If noise of jets leaving the Airport hasn’t let by any ability for reflection, let ask to Giovanni Battista Pedrinazzi.
He manages this inn for almost half a century that is something much more and different way of a simple table: It’s a place of suffering. First for this land and than for the people. Well, let’s role the question. Malpensa is very near here and it is so colled because when Case Nuove - at the end of 1500s - was founded by Visconti family as colony, it was considered a very dry land and able to give nothing: It was therefore a “malpensata” (which in italian sound like wrong idea). So much so that there is a farmhouse still so colled.
In fact from here the Gradenasca heath expanded and the landscape becomes dreamly. The culinary art that Giovanni Battista is able to give you is much more real. Very kind and also straightfoward, provident toward the product of the territory with a thick historical-gastronomical culture, the patron de La Quercia avail oneself of the leading of the kitchen and local and of the gentle contribution of Pinuccia and Cira. And you understand why here you feel in family because the menu and the table are familiar. It’s a inn where bread love and Lombardy is waited on! Let’s see the very good things of the menu. Parma ham, rustic salami with vegetable strudel, aromatized beef with marinated vegetable (a good cold dish that breaks the monotony of usually tonnè calf now endemic in the northen tables), aubergines in arlecchino, risotto with mushrooms or with blueberry and radicchio, parmigiana crepes au gratin shelled king prawns au gratin, grouper in a pastry crust, Fillets of perch golden. Also rarities such as snails de Bourgogne. But the access to other stages of gastronomic pleasure: soup of spelt and vegetables, potato dumplings with vegetables meat ravioli with cream, risotto milanese style, baked lamb with potatoes, Grilled chicken breast with sesame seeds, sirloin with balsamic vinegar. All really good, and mainly, as would have required our mentor Brilliant -Savarin, all pervaved by the exactitude of Giovanni Battista Pedrinazzi, the sisters-in-law in the kitchen, the place. The only one suggestion is pay attention to moderate the choice because the portions are generous like the affection that from the dish is transmitted to you. You can not leave La Quercia without taste one of the dessert: tiramisù, ice-cream meringue in the oven (with sponge cake) or panna cotta. The cheese list is the best, all selected by Giovanni Battista with love and prediletion. The cellar gives you more than hundred possibility of choice. And after let entice to have a chat with this host in love with his land. A beautiful land that deserves a little of your time: to visit the Visconti Castle, to let you infect by science with the history of the geodesic triangle that allowed to draw the first real map of the Lombardy, and from the myth of the Ghianda miracle. While away after hearing to flow Ticino river and your thoughts become light like the thin pleasure that a meal by Giovanni Battista leaves. A smiley innkeeper.
Carlo Cambi - Il Mangiarozzo 2009
