In the 45 years since she opened its doors, Al Castelletto has become a place of gastronomic pilgrimage, where patrons visit as much for Clemi as they do her cooking. Indeed, the lore around the septuagenarian chef is almost as potent as her food. ‘Once, eons ago, I took Clemi to New York, where my sister lived at the time,’ recalls Vera. ‘I was visiting the Twin Towers and somebody came up to us and said: “Clemi, what are you doing here?” It’s amazing, she’s known all over the world.’ Even today, the chef still holds court over the dining room most days of the week. Making her rounds among the tables, greeting some with incomparable warmth, others with a suspicious eye. ‘If she doesn’t like you, you’ll know,’ jokes Vera, ‘because you’ll be eating on the veranda.’
No matter where you’re assigned to sit, the food remains the real draw. ‘She prepares very simple, very traditional food,’ explains her nephew, Nicolò Bof, who has worked alongside Clemi in running their family restaurant for the past nine years. ‘The dishes follow the seasons. Right now in the autumn, we have mushrooms tagliatelle and pumpkin risotto. In the winter, we use radicchio.’ But the centrepiece of the menu, and in fact, of the entire restaurant, is the spit-roasted meat, cooked on an open flame grill – known as a fogher in Venetian dialect – that sits in the middle of the dining room.
According to Nicolò, a fogher is a common sight in local restaurants. And in fact, much of Al Castelletto’s furnishings have been collected from the local area. The thick red stripes painted on the walls are the very same as those in the dining room at the top of the hill. The floral-printed ceramic dishes were picked up in the nearby town of Nove de Bassano, while the dainty-coloured glassware was sourced in Murano. The table linens, meanwhile, come from Mussolente, a village in Veneto prized for its textiles. ‘We make the tablecloths ourselves,’ says Nicolò, who even had a local seamstress craft the napkin-like pendant lamps that illuminate the dining room. ‘On Tuesdays when the restaurant is closed Clemi and I go to Mussolente to buy fabrics.’ And without fail, each table comes adorned with vases bursting with cut blooms. ‘Clemi’s father, on his deathbed, wanted her to become either a cook or a florist,’ adds Nicolò. ‘For this reason, every week we prepare fresh bouquets of flowers.’
Even now at 78 years old, Clemi remains dedicated to her craft, with no signs of slowing down. ‘I’m worried because she’s getting old. I tell her to please rest and stop cooking,’ frets Vera. ‘But it’s her life – and she loves it.’
