La Ciau del Tornavento — Restaurant in Treiso

TLDR; This Michelin Star was clearly awarded years ago and they have just forgotten to come review this restaurant again recently.

The staff was inexperienced and uninformed, the food is uninspired and served poorly. AVOID!

Longer Review:

You enter the restaurant through a small glass anteroom that is where they permit smoking and the ashtrays are filled with cigarette butts. The door is broken and the customized carpet with the name of the restaurant on it is falling apart. That should give you a good indication of the kind of experience you've signed up for.

The background music is played too loud to just be ambient and, even though you're in the heart of Piedmont, the music is a terrible muzak channel of arranged jazz-influenced acoustic renditions from 1980-2000 by Sting, Paul Simon and Journey interspersed with multiple songs from the movie Shrek.

The tasting menus look compelling but everyone at the table is required to order the same thing for you to be allowed to take part. For us that wasn't even a possibility as everyone had different opinions on what they wanted for lunch.

Ordering a la carte is a clumsy affair with multiple dishes designed to be eaten family-style listed on the same page as individual appetizers. The menu is also long enough to rival a Cheesecake Factory with their house specialties finally showing up on page 10.

The wine list is MONSTROUS. It's meant to be intimidating and, when you get offered a tour of their cellar after your meal you'll understand that it's a big show bravado by the owner and I thought it was designed to make every guest feel like they're 'less than'. 65,000 bottles to choose from?

After ordering wine and food you'll receive an amuse-bouche that will be the highlight of your meal. Enjoy it, the slide downhill into malaise will happen shortly after.

There were three of us at lunch and we ordered:

Frog Legs (meant for 2 - which was more than enough because they're so bland that you'll only want to eat one each and there are 8 on the plate)

Foie Gras (included two slices of terrine paired with a single raspberry and compote, some smoked foie gras with small chunks of walnut and thin strips of granny smith apple, and a third portion of some sliced 'meat' of unrecognizable origin that was completely devoid of any taste. It also came with 4 toast points of what was billed as 'hazelnut bread' but it just tasted stale)

Snails with smoked foie gras (barely any foie gras with a giant pile of 2 dozen snails over an odd pecorino cheese sauce)

Before sharing the details of our entrees it's important to comment on the service level:

A Michelin Star is awarded based on five criteria with the fifth being a consistently excellent experience. That's hard to quantify but it's easy for anyone to know when service isn't excellent.

Our waiters were not informed about the items on the menu and apathetic, failed to clear the table in a timely manner and did not clean crumbs until after our dessert (especially important given the number of food items that were meant to be eaten by hand).

Direct example: when our appetizers were brought out our waitress didn't make eye contact while mumbling a poor description of the food while looking away in a distracted manner. I was also asked, in each course, "Is this what you ordered?"

Our entrees were:

Goat served two ways* with some soggy vegetables and a potato chip standing vertically in a small pile of uninspired mashed potatoes

Fried Veal served with the exact same soggy vegetables (think chicken fried steak but without any gravy)

Fried Lamb served with fried veal brain, fried apple and other fried items - all the same color and served on a piece of paper

*About 8 minutes after serving the goat a waiter walked back out and delivered a small side plate of the same random fried items that were paired with the fried lamb

But most frustrating: two of our three entrees were served. It took 6 minutes for them to deliver the third entree so the first two items went cold during the...

Worth an international trip!! The location is breathtaking, with views extending for over a 100 miles, with the manicured vineyards on the rolling hills the Langhe and the snow capped crests of the Alps as a background. Then comes the food, wine and service to match. The food is traditional Italian haute cuisine at its best, with both fish and meat menus of standard portions, not teeny weeny nouvelle cuisine type nor oversized, intertwined by a generous selection of bite size delicacies from the chefs glorious repertoire. This is a culinary experience not to be missed. As for the wine list, the owners of the restaurant have built the first or second largest collection of high end wines in Europe, focused on the Italian greats and Piedmont and Tuscany, and French premiers crus. For those with a passion for wine, this is the place to overindulge yourself with unique bottles and vintages, but there excellent bottles of all prices starting from around €30.00

For wine we had an Italian gem from another region, the wine that has been getting the most awards points from Italian guides, San Leonardo from Trentino Alto Adige, one of my favourites and definitely the best value for money on the market. A more balanced and elegant wine than the more tannic wines from Barolo.

The service was impeccable, personal and there is a great sense of teamwork in a familiar kind of atmosphere. Professional but not stuffy.

Overall the experience is absolutely first class, very refined and the price is right for this kind of quality. As compared to international cities pricing, it is an unbelievable bargain. Sure, you still have to get there, but...

Some dishes were good, but Le Ciau doesn’t deserve the Michelin star.

Broad selection of wines it seems, but you can’t choose from a menu and our waiter wasn’t very helpful sharing which wines we could actually choose from, and didn’t provide any recommendations, so we had to sort of guess blind what they had by the glass - which was a weird situation.

With regard to the food, we enjoyed the buffala torteloni with anchovies & the cuttlefish “cappuccino”, but the other 3 dishes were a underwhelming. There were some good flavours in there, but the technical execution of most of our dishes seemed fairly junior - the choux pastry at the end of the meal was soggy for example & the veal steak was cut with too much fat on it & served on a griddle which was only performative rather than adding any real value to the food. The herbs & spices were either too light or too much - which made the whole meal feel like a lot of heavy, similar food.

There’s also not enough air conditioning in the restaurant - seems like that would be a small thing, but it’s uncomfortable when you’re too warm while you’re eating - especially if there’s a lot of food.

The service was extremely polite and conversational, but at times quite slow. The table next to us had to get up and retrieve their wine so that they could pour it - not a big deal if you’re at home or in a smaller restaurant, but at a Michelin starred place where the tasting menu is €110 - €130 per person, that’s not a good sign.

All in all, it was OK, our bill was €180, which isn’t too bad, but we won’t go back. There are so many better places you can eat in the region...