The Osteria at Brolio reflects on the future

At the Osteria at Brolio, we’ve reflected and we continue to reflect on the future as we look forward to the beginning of the 2020 season.

The scheduled date of 20 March has inevitably slipped away due to the COVID-19 emergency, which has led to social distancing and staying home in lock down to protect ourselves and everyone else.

It isn’t possible to plan an opening date today, even if it would be a sign of optimism, a sign of a resumption of normality: we have to wait.

In the meantime, judging by the many images on social media we are all – truly all of us! – engaged in rediscovering family cookbooks, in trying to recreate that magic that the memory of a scent or taste evokes. Even the Osteria at Brolio, although closed, has staff taking part in exercises of this kind at a distance. Video calls have long exceeded the maximum limit for the network of data throughout the peninsula, but it is the only way to see and compare and talk about the recipe we’ve just made and share the steps, the reasoning, the choices. This is precisely the task that we are undertaking while waiting to see you cross the threshold of our dear restaurant. And there really are those among us who have dusted off ancient home cookbooks, those handwritten by our mothers and grandmothers, those stained with cooking sauce, thick with notes and additions in the margins. They are priceless treasures from which to draw inspiration to recreate that same magic that remains evocative and comforting even when the final products are new and different.

So, one day we’ll smile again in our wonderful Belpaese, leave our homes and go to work, meet people and shake their hands: come that day, we’ll be ready.  And we will all still have to help; we’ll have to remember what we have overcome while we rebuild what was damaged.

It will be essential to breathe life back into the hospitality industry, prioritizing the national territory instead of taking resources abroad, spending the economic reserves left in our pockets within our Bella Italia.

Therefore, if you can, drink Italian now that you are at home, eat Italian now and continue to do so afterward. And when you can, and you want to enjoy a day in a magnificent place, come and visit us in Brolio.