Osteria Francescana
Cod with green curry and starfruit
Osteria Francescana review at-a-glance
Awards: #1 Worlds 50 Best, Three Michelin stars
+Lots of originality from the kitchen with clever presentations and innovative combinations of flavor.
-Disconnect between the kitchen and front of house (FOH) causes the meal to lose meaning and detracts from the experience.
-The expectations for Osteria Francescana are so high it is almost impossible to meet them but it could have come closer.
Review Rating: 90/100
Verdict: Massimo Bottura tries to tell a story through his food. This type of story-driven cooking can work - some of my favorite meals have been at restaurants like Kadeau and Hisa Franko where the chef’s personality and background come through clearly on the plate. However, for this type of cooking to work you need a great connection between the kitchen and the FOH. If the FOH does not tell the story, the meaning of the dish and tasting menu can be lost. This is where my main problem with Osteria Francescana resides - the FOH was outright bad. Completely robotic, lacking any enthusiasm for the food, and primarily concerned with extracting patrons from as much money as possible. They were the antithesis of Chef Bottura who presented one dish with such passion you could not help but enjoy it.
Stripping away the outsized expectation foisted on it by its reputation, most of the food at Osteria Francescana was very good. Not near the impossible level “#1 in the world” would suggest but still good. The kitchen was creative and successfully pulled off some exciting flavor combinations. Amongst all the creativity, the technical skills never dipped as each course was executed well. Ignoring the FOH, I would rate this a 94 or 95 out of 100. Unfortunately, the FOH detracted from the experience and caused a lower score. A real shame considering the level of skill evident in the kitchen and the reputation of the restaurant.
Price I Paid: €290 for a 12-course tasting menu
Value: 10/20
Osteria Francescana and Massimo Bottura Background
I won’t bore you with much of the history of Osteria Francescana - it is well covered on Chef’s Table as well as numerous other spots on the internet. This is arguably the most famous restaurant in Italy after all, achieving #1 on the Worlds 50 Best list. It is also one of the hardest tables to book given its international acclaim and the fact that there are only 12 tightly spaced tables at Osteria Francescana. Reservations open three months in advance and sell out within minutes. If you are unable to plan that far ahead I highly recommend using the waitlist as it works frequently if you are flexible - that is how I ended up getting my table.
If you can’t live with the dice roll of the waitlist and have a bank account with the GDP of a small nation you can also consider booking a room at the Chef’s hotel Maria Lugia. For the low price of €500 per night, staying at the hotel (booking non-refundable even in the times of COVID) guarantees you a table at Francescana at Maria Lugia so you can spend another €310 per person on the tasting menu. Given the price tag, these seats are much easier to come by than at the main restaurant.
What is more relevant to you is the restaurant’s new history. After many years of serving the dishes that made him famous, Massimo Bottura used the COVID lockdown as a creative break to launch a completely new menu. The classics are still offered a la carte (or in tasting menu format at Maria Lugia) but you won’t find ‘five ages of parmesan’ or ‘oops I dropped the lemon tart’ on the tasting menu anymore. Instead, the menu is called “with a little help my friends” to reflect the influences of the many nationalities of Massimo’s kitchen staff who provided input on the new menu. Each course is also named after a Beatles song that goes with the theme of the dish as the meal is meant to take you through a “psychedelic” journey with unexpected flavors and presentations.
To enjoy a meal at Osteria Francescana you don’t just need the luck to make a reservation - you will need a healthy bank account to pay for the tasting menu which came in at €290 when I visited. No bargain was to be found in the wine pairing either which cost €190. This is fine by Paris standards but on the higher side for Italy. That said, they sell every table so clearly could charge more if they wanted to.
Before I comment on the food, I need to highlight that I found the FOH at Francescana very below average - so much so that it was the single thing I remember the most about the meal. Service is a matter of opinion and, as a non-Italian, there can always be cultural differences and some things can be lost in translation. As a result, I will just say the things I noticed and then you can form your own opinion if this is the standard of service you would expect at a three-star restaurant.
We were a little late for our reservation so this can be forgiven but they were extremely aggressive in trying to get our orders at the start of the meal, multiple servers asking for our wine and menu selections in short order. Given that COVID required us to bring the menu up via QR code I am not sure how they expected us to be ready to order - the first time they asked me if I was ready I had not even successfully brought up the menu. This was particularly jarring as at most Michelin meals I actually find that the service gets to a slow start where I need to practically wave down the servers.
We asked the sommelier to pick a white wine within our price range that had a strong minerality. He actually did a great job of this - we loved the wine he picked! However, when the wine was brought he did not explain where it was from, ask us to taste it, or even if the selection was agreeable. He poured two glasses, left the bottle and walked away. Bizzare.
There was no English version of the tasting menu. While it was surprising given I am sure they have a large international customer base this is not an issue by itself. The problem occurred when we asked the server if he could help explain the menu. Rather than doing the sensible thing and explain the main components of each dish, he started going into the robotic, long memorized descriptions that are made when the dish is presented. We had to cut him off after 2-courses and decided to go with the tasting menu sight unseen.
Throughout the meal, explanations of the courses were muddy. The waiters dropped off dishes and went through the quickest recital possible of the ingredients and left. They seemed to be checking the boxes rather than having any real enthusiasm for the food they were serving.
We were sitting in a room with three other tables. As we got to the end of the meal, all three other tables were served Chef Bottura’s most famous dish - five-years of parmesan. When we asked if it was included in the menu, our waiter said all three other tables had asked for the dish at the start of the meal. When we asked if the dish could be substituted into our tasting menu he said no, it could only be added as an extra dish for…€80 per person, over 25% of the cost of the tasting menu. Somehow I can’t believe the other three tables each individually signed up for this €160 supplement but that is what the waiter said.
Not directly related to the service but the best way I could describe the dining room at Francescana is.. fine? The tables were not exactly close but not as well spaced as you’d expect. The color palette was neutral and there was a bit of artwork on the walls. The overall effect was a pretty sterile ambiance where you could overhear the conversations of your neighbors without trying. I guess there are limitations with the space but this was certainly in the bottom third of three star dining rooms I have been in. A comparison to the dining rooms of its peers as former “Best restaurants in the World” such as El Cellar De Can Roca, Mirazur or even Eleven Madison Park is not a favorable one.
Review of what we ate at Osteria Francescana
The meal kicked off with three colorful meringues which were presented as ‘pills of LSD’ to start your psychedelic meal inspired by the Beatles. The pink was beet flavored with gorgonzola creme, the green was basil and mint, and lastly, the orange included carrot and ginger. Ignoring the questionable storytelling, I was pretty impressed by the technique on these bites as the meringue was exceedingly light and the texture on the cremes velvety and smooth.
The next course was bread, perfected by the kitchen after many attempts during the COVID lockdown. This was good bread for sure, super crunchy, nice flakes of salt, and a hint of sweetness from a bit of honey. Was this bread worthy of a course? Hardly. While I enjoyed this quite a bit, even if it was sold at my local bakery at a reasonable price it wasn’t good enough that I would be buying it every week. I am not sure why they felt a need to count the amuses, petit fours, and this bread as courses on the menu - it is not like people would cancel their reservation if they found out the tasting menu was only 8-courses instead of 11.
The next dish was named ‘Cellophane Flowers & Kaleidoscope Eyes’ but really consisted of salanova, nori seaweed, cuttlefish, scallops, bottarga, mussels. For me, this was the most successful dish of the meal as far as melding flavors with Massimo Bottura’s playfulness and desire to breakdown boundaries in Italian cuisine. From afar this looked like a prettily decorated head of lettuce with a bit of balsamic vinegarette on it. While your eyes told you that you were eating a simple salad, your taste told you it was closer to eating an oyster. The balsamic was actually squid ink and various types of shellfish were folded in between the lettuce, imparting the taste of the sea. Overall, a very nice blend of creativity and taste from Bottura and the team.
The meal stayed with seafood with the “yellow submarine” which was an Italian’s cheeky take on fish and chips. For fish and chips, this course featured a very elaborate description involving a saffron risotto crust on turbot and three different sauces made by the kitchen. Despite the preamble, this was a rather ordinary bit of fried fish. The kitchen may have incorporated three sauces in the dish but I could hardly tell as the pineapple one was so prominent it was all I could taste.
This next dish was supposedly inspired by the Beetles song ‘Strawberry Fields’ and featured strawberry risotto, raw langoustine, and buffalo milk mozzarella. While the dish sounded bizarre, somehow the flavors all blended together well. Better than a more classic risotto? No, but more exciting.
Pork belly, clams, and ravioli were labeled as “We are all connected under one roof”. Massimo was doing his rounds through the dining room when this dish was delivered so he ended up describing it, explaining the dish was given its name as it was inspired by the many nationalities working in his kitchen - Italian clams, pork belly, ravioli that were made so impossibly thin they disappeared on your palate like a dumpling, and a broth similar to New England clam chowder. In stark contrast to the regular servers who were going through the motions, Massimo’s immense passion was infectious and really communicated the story behind the dish. With such a passionate, engaging Chef it is puzzling how the FOH is so poor. If they were a fraction the host Massimo was this could have been a much better meal. All of that said this was a very good dish, the clam and pork belly a tremendous combination and the accompanying broth both rich and light at the same time.
The meal kept with the Asian influences with a dish of cod and green curry which was a little safer course than the past few dishes. Still, this was a capably prepared piece of fish and most importantly the green curry was gentle enough to not overpower the seafood.
The main course was a glazed pigeon with blueberries and elderberries, a sauce of cherries, a croquette of pigeon with apricots and savor. This was a dish that showed off that the kitchen was not only able to do modern dishes but had plenty of classical cooking chops. The pigeon meat was tender and the jus it was served with was intensely flavored. Everything was balanced out by the flowers and pickled vegetables on top of the pigeon breast. Even better was the croquette, crispy and light and with nice fatty leg meat. Gorgeous.
We moved back to the more mind-bending type dish with a foie gras flan which looked exactly like a caramel flan but actually featured prominent foie gras flavors. This was a cool dish as you got the flavor of the foie with some sweetness from the caramel but to be honest it was just ok - I would have preferred to just eat a flan and foie gras dish separately.
Pre-dessert was called ‘Summer is Coming’ and featured an assortment of different flavored granitas including pea, strawberry, carrot, yogurt foam, and carmelized basil leaves. This was a very nice pre-dessert, refreshing with lots of interesting textural contrasts and the basil flavor coming through nicely.
The main dessert was “In the sky without Lucy” with the sky being cotton candy placed on top of the dessert. Underneath the cotton candy was roasted peaches, cranberry sauce, birch syrup, rosemary ice cream, and rose meringue. This was quite good, the roasted peaches having lots of flavor and the use of rosemary ice cream was an inspired choice by the kitchen.
Petit fours featured a handful of madeleines and a few cherry-based bites (only one pictured). This was a forgettable end if you compare to say the petit four cart at El Cellar De Can Roca or what you get at Frantzen. The plate of madeleines here actually highlights the gulf between the quality of my meal at Frantzen and Osteria Francescana - Frantzen the madeleines were served fresh from the oven, the best I have ever had. The ones at Osteria Francescana were just average.