PiperoRoma — Restaurant in Rome

Pipero Roma is the type of restaurant that requires a long enough article, I hope you will forgive me, because it is very interesting, both in the work and the mindset of chef Luciano Monosilio. A vision, quite original, but faced with constraints that require reflection. To put it simply, a willingness to work contrasting tastes by focusing much on bitter.

Clean scenery without great interest, fun chandeliers, paintings not in the center of the walls (but it seems that it is a will of the artist ...), nothing but very common for the moment.

The menu offers two menus with 6 or 10 services, of which nothing is known, or "à la carte".

The first entree is a donkey tartar and squid accompanied by 3 (!) beans and bean mousse. I can see in advance howling. Donkey! Poor animal!!! Having discussed with the chef in English, I thought at first that they told me "monkey". Arghh! So I did well to avoid a heart attack. And we finish on "donkey". Besides, meat a little bland and firm. The dish was only two days on the menu and lacks really oomph. Even the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Pipero, has agreed. I think the pieces should be grind more finelly and deserve additional seasoning.

Next dish, duck tartare (also a little coarse chop) sandwich of a kind of dry gingerbread, mayonnaise with mustard and candied pineapple. The real excitement comes from the small leaf of aromatic herb that really raises the dish. Regret that there are only two, while one bite is needed.

The following operations: mullet fillet with perfect cooking but visually tempered by a green sauce in "splash" (confers photo) and tastefully by a tapenade of black olives absolutely succulent but in very large quantities. It pulverizes the taste of the mullet. A few scattered spikes would be largely sufficient.

Finally the balanced dish! Eel in cardon leaf and cardon mousse and Italian cheese. A wonder.

Who thinks Italy thinks pasta. Who thinks pasta thinks "al dente". And here, the Italians give us lessons with these tagliatelli cooked almost dry in a reduced broth of red peppers. It explodes in the mouth!

But the Romans also taught us that the Tarpeian rock is near the Capitol. You are afraid? And you are right because our chef felt here in his obsession of contradictory tastes with a strong propensity to dominate bitterness. Rigatone with broccoli accompanied by sausage crumbs and pecorino mousse is the unfortunate outcome. Rigatoni almost raw, too spicy meat and cheese do not effectively counterbalance the bitterness of the greenery.

The following dish a variation on carbonara, (with tea powder bis), reveals a more pragmatic problem: after an egg, we are on our third plate following including pasta. Nice but, even if pasta are al dente cooked, the carbohydrate index is propelling itself to stratospheric heights. An alternation with one of the other dishes would have been welcome.

Rest the meat last, with a perfect reduction of substance, clarified and concentrated. And a little bit of Lapsang Souchong! Phew!

To conclude, we have a chef who takes a lot of risk in his dishes. This sometimes leads to interesting surprises.

This is also problematic on liquid accompaniment. France not being the center of the wine world, I let myself be carried by the sommelier's advice. But I must recognize that there is a lot to do with the desires of the chef. We could taste a lot of interesting wines but the consistency with the dishes was not obvious.

The little extras we are not used to in France: the welcome with a glass of Champagne Pommery offered and the freedom not to take the same tasting menu for the whole table. And the icing on the cake, offer a tasting to the spouse who takes the lightest menu so that it does not end up too often with a lack of plate. I call it elegance, if I ever saw it. Bill of 370 euros. More restaurants on my blog...

I had a great deal of expectations around this place, delighting my wife’s and my palate to a culinary experience and an otherworldly gastronomic journey. I opted for the 8 course menu (160€ pp) and the add-on wine matching service (70€ pp) to make sure we could get the most out of this place. Let’s start in order with the atmosphere and first impact: sophisticated as you would expect with a non fully successful mix of (too few) traditional elements and (too many) aseptic modernist touches, starting with the caged Rubik’s cube in the middle of the dining table which ends up being no more than a weird though colorful finishing in an otherwise quite dully colored ambiance. Tastes are tastes, and this is my own assessment. The service is not at the level I expect from a Michelin star restaurant: an unobserving eye might mistake the presence of numerous attendants as the maximum sign of luxury and service, though no number of waiters and waitresses can make up for attentiveness, orientation to details and sense of care. While we had 3 people following us throughout the evolution of our experience, none of this called for us to feel like we were ‘personally’ followed and cared for - the human touch didn’t go over the basics of what a waiter does in many other places other than a starred restaurant. Their uniforms, furthermore, were not always clean, showing several signs from the foods they came in contact with. Don’t get me wrong, nothing outrageously disturbing… and yet something you notice at a Michelin star restaurant. Beyond this, the engagement throughout our menu felt like a basic school exercise. Executed routinely, without extremes. To give a sense of what I mean: all the courses received a very basic, didactic explanation, without any articulation of what lies beyond just the ingredients, articulating how they were prepared and what they and the whole course should represent. Again, this is something I expect at a Michelin star restaurant: it is not just about enjoying the ingredients in your plate; it is as well about entertaining your senses with the visual and verbal induction into the history of those ingredients and the care and the thought and love they received until they were skillfully crafted just for you. The food was all very good of course (pending some very personal palate) but not showing anything really out of the schemes of plates already seen (to be clear, don’t expect full re-elaboration of recipes). But all very skillfully executed. I appreciated the wine matching service though even here I would have wanted to receive a more engaging experience. Saying things like ‘mineral’ ‘leather’ ‘cherries’ etc. is not enough. ESPECIALLY in a place like this you need to embrace the unknown, the untold and whatever lies behind a wine. Also, whereas all wines where undoubtedly of good quality, none of them was a rare or unknown find (not to talk about the price, as I would not expect a 20€ bottle to be used for this service… but it was). To sum it all up: a very well executed and very technical school exercise, though alas not an above and beyond experience that makes you relish at every step of the way asking for more. That ‘more’ was behind the corner but didn’t...

Poor experience. Please read prior to booking.

Food. There were some modest hits and some disastrous lows. We read some mixed reviews online, but didn’t want to miss out on something great, given the Michelin Star. The pasta was nearly inedible, as one pasta dish was over-cooked and the other almost hard— nowhere near al dente. Dishes were disjointed and lacked balance, finesse, and, frankly, proper cooking. For example, the carbonara was crunchy, overly cheesy, and so salty the Dead Sea would purse its lips.

CONCERNING OBSERVATION: when I went to the bathroom mid-service (which was quite nice, clean, and spacious), I found the supply closet door open… Unfortunately, I found multiple boxes of Barilla pasta, which looked ominously like the crunchy carbonara we tried our best to eat moments before. I kid you not, I spent €140/person on store bought pasta… Yes, it does feel as bad as it sounds…

Service. HORRIBLE. We were seated on the second floor alone from other diners. Half-way through, two scantily clad women arrived, who were clearly related to an employee (lots of hellos, cheek kisses, and attention), and our service declined considerably. After our final course, we waited 45 minutes before I was forced to track down the manager in order to acquire the bill. My wine glass and water had been empty for 35 minutes. Our waiter climbed the stairs twice to check on our nearly naked neighbors without glancing at my wife and me or offering to refill our glasses. Frankly, unacceptable.

Wine pairing. The wine was fine. I enjoyed trying new wines from around Italy. There was not much explanation on the grapes/wine, but that may be due to a language barrier. The pairings, however, were tragic. A dessert wine with the carbonara? Full bodied red (quite balanced and nice, in fact), with cheesy, overcooked miso pasta. We finished with an amaro that paired with our dessert as well as stripes with polka dots.

Restaurant. Elegant and beautiful. I wish I could pause the entire affair when I sat comfortably at our table prior to food, wine, and service. The music choices were excellent, relaxing, and set the mood for an experience entirely unlike my own.

In conclusion, I have eaten at numerous Michelin starred restaurants and I find this one to be the worst not just for value, but also for food quality, service, and...