Tigelleria In The Press

Go green, buy organic, save the planet, right? Those notions are all well and good, but when it comes to thinking about quality restaurant food, some people might think that organic, biodynamic and sustainable translate to flavorless, flavorless and flavorless.

Tigelleria Ristorante in Campbell is working to prove that organic can be synonymous with delicious if it's done right. Touting itself as a cucina organica tipica Italiana, Tigelleria adheres firmly to most traditions of Italian cuisine, importing key ingredients and serving only organic when possible.

Warm and stylish, the décor is tastefully vibrant, with classical frescoes, a few fresh, art deco influences and walls bedecked with bottles of Italian and California wines. The mildly intimate ambience is enhanced by showings of silent Italian films by the bar, making this the kind of place to impress a date with your eye for low-pressure class. The blissful menu of mostly organic Italian- and Mediterranean-inspired fare boasts fine cheeses, cured Italian meats, piping-hot flat breads and savory meat and pasta entrees. They also do vegan and vegetarian dishes that will knock the socks off of even the most adamant butter-loving carnivores.

Bringing the idea of eco-conscious change into fine dining, Tigelleria uses 100 percent recycled paper products, tankless water heaters, detergents not tested on animals and only Energy Star–rated appliances.

Tigelleria Redefines Italian Dining

by Aleta Watson

Tigella (tea-jella) n. - Small flat bread baked between heated tiles; traditional in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

It's only natural that South Bay diners would think they know Italian food. Not only is there a long history of Italian fishermen, bakers and restaurateurs in the Bay Area, but a new generation of ambitious chefs have introduced us to the joys of the country's artisanal ingredients, from aged balsamic vinegar to hand-crafted salumi and creamy-centered burrata cheese.

Then along comes a restaurant like Tigelleria Ristorante in downtown Campbell and we get a whole new perspective on the Italian way of eating. Antipasti, usually little more than the prelude to a meal, are the main event at this charming little spot. Owners Mirco Caramori and Elisabetta Benetollo have organized their menu around the little flat breads they grew up with near Mantua.

Hot from the baking stone, the fairly bland tigelle are served with platters of flavorful cured meat, cheese or grilled vegetables for a convivial meal focused as much on the company as the food. Split the puffy little breads in half, tuck in a bit of meat, a chunk of cheese and perhaps some hummus, olive tapanade or fava and mint spread and you're on your way to an enjoyable evening.

Caramori and Benetollo, husband and wife, opened Tigelleria in December in a former florist's shop that they remodeled from the ground up. It's an inviting rust-colored stucco building with a tile roof, wood trellises over the windows and cobalt blue pots planted with bougainvillea.
Inside, the 40-seat dining room gets points for style with its tile floors, halogen lights and dramatic red glass Artemide chandelier hanging below a reproduction of a 16th-century ceiling fresco. Bare wood tables and rush-seated chairs were made to order in the style of a typical osteria. Fellini films flicker on the wall behind the bar.
"We wanted to be 100 percent Italian," says Benetollo, who runs the front of the house and makes the desserts. "We wanted to serve real Italian food. We want to teach people to try the real Italian experience."

The wine list is dominated by Italian wines, too. Among them is a very nice 2005 Chianti classico from Castello d'Albola ($9/glass) and a pleasant, dry 2006 Bardolino Chiaretto rosé from Cavalchina in the Veneto region ($8/glass).

Benetollo's cheerful personality makes the dining room a warm and friendly place. She obviously enjoys stopping by tables to chat with diners about Tigelleria's concept or explain dishes. Service is attentive.

Although the menu includes the usual soups, salads and some exceptional pastas, the emphasis is on the bread paired with imported meats hand-sliced by Caramori, a software engineer turned restaurateur.

Beautiful, tissue-thin layers of prosciutto di Parma, speck ham, roast pork, mortadella, air-dried beef or salami are arranged in varying combinations ($14-$18) on large, round cutting boards. Some combos may include pecorino, buffalo mozzarella, Gorgonzola, provolone or fontina cheese. Alternatively, there are platters devoted to grilled vegetables ($16) or cheese ($12-$20).
The meats are excellent, the speck smoky and rich, the prosciutto sweet with a melting texture. I particularly liked the porchetta, roast pork with a whisper of fennel, on the "Etrusco" platter, called a palette on the menu ($15). Sharp pecorino Romano cheese was a nice counterpoint.
Still, so much unrelieved meat and cheese quickly becomes tiresome. My companion and I fared better on the first visit when we ordered the grilled vegetables, including meaty porcini mushrooms, to pair with the basic salumi palette ($18). It was way too much food for two, but the vegetables brought balance to the meal. Salads are generous and made with very fresh greens.

Finocchio, a large tangle of shaved fennel, Parmesan and pine nuts drizzled with 15-year-old balsamic vinegar ($11) was too much of a good thing: a smaller serving would have piqued the appetite rather than overwhelm it.

By far, the most memorable dishes we ate at Tigelleria were pastas. The mellow, well-seasoned Bolognese sauce on tender ribbons of pappardelle ($14) was pure comfort food. Bucatini all'Amatriciana ($13) was chewy and wonderful with a bright and chile-spiked sauce cloaking long strands of tubular pasta similar to thick spaghetti - but better.

Desserts are Benetollo's specialty, and her tiramisu ($6) is a classic, light and airy with a soft undercurrent of Marsala. The sweet chocolate salame ($6), a fudgy roll of dark chocolate and crunchy almond cookie crumbs, is quite good, and the meringue cake ($7) of meringue blended with zabaglione, whipped cream and white and dark chocolate is irresistible.

Tigelleria Ristorante Organic

by Vanessa DellaPasqua

What a wonderful experience to be served an unusual meal, in a pleasant setting, with high-quality ingredients!! That’s in a nutshell the experience we’ve had at Tigelleria, a nine-month old establishment close to downtown Campbell. It’s easy not to notice it if you don’t know where it is, but once you enter you’re handsomely rewarded by a nice ambiance and delicious, modern Italian food!

Tigelle are small warm flat bread (well, technically a tigella is the tool you use to make them, but in current Italian we refer to tigelle as the bread!) typical of the area around Modena. Till recent years it was rare to find them outside their area of origin, but today they travel far- to California, nonetheless! They are traditionally served with a board of salumi, charcuterie assorted cold cuts, from prosciutto to coppa and pancetta and porchetta and salame and… you get the idea! You take a tigella, slice it in half, fill it with your choice of cured meat and cheese, and then enjoy- a wonderful treat the Tigelleria embraces to the tee, with “bottomless” tigelle and wonderful quality cuts. while you’re waiting for your order, fresh tigelle are taken to your table with a mix of spreads- on our visit it was a black olive tapenade, an eggplant mix, and a carrot spread. Quite delicious!

This is informal dining at its best. It may seems like you’re just getting a snack, but tigelle, just like piadine, eaten like this are considered a full dinner meal. And what a meal! Tigelleria carries some salumi that are hard to find, like the delicious smoked speck, which we ordered on the Bruschette Speck e Cipolla as an appetizer. What a treat!! The bread was lightly rubbed with garlic and charbroiled, and the mix of smoky speck and sweet baked onions was truly impressive.

We then waited a bit to get our main course- the trio palette, featuring a combination of salumi, grilled vegetables and cheeses. What was on it? well, just about everything: prosciutto di parma, prosciutto cotto, coppa, pancetta, speck, porchetta, mortadella, finocchiona (a salame with fennel seeds), crescenza, mozzarella di bufala, gorgonzola, provolone, asiago, fontina, pecorino, caciotta, flakes of Parmigiano Reggiano sprinkled with aged balsamic vinegar, grilled zucchini and eggplants and porcini mushrooms, and a selection of spreads including orange blossom honey, fig preserve, sun dried tomato, and tapenade. Need I say more?

What a wonderful dish!! What delicious flavors!! Not to mention the small cacciatorino, a small fresh salame the chef sent our table, served with a wonderful chestnut spread-a feast!

Twenty tigelle later, we were quite filled- and wonderfully satisfied!! They also brought us a small dish of Nutella to finish off our tigelle basket- a sign of love, if you ask me! Although this is not a meal for every day, it is a wonderful way to enjoy Italian conviviality at its best- in fact, the owners encourage their patrons to enjoy the time they are at the table, and “take it slow” (their service is for sure not one that will wow you, but it’s part of the experience!). A member of Slow Food, a fully organic restaurant, this small husband-and-wife venture brings a piece of Emilia to downtown Campbell!

An Innovative Twist on Italian

by Cheryl Sternman Rule

The fact that you can get pretty much any kind of food in the South Bay is no great shocker. From $4 bowls of ramen to $175 fondue extravaganzas, Silicon Valley has the dining spectrum pretty well covered. Maybe that's why discovering a new restaurant with an innovative concept is such a nice surprise. At Campbell's warm, intimate Tigelleria, the food itself isn't so unusual, but the restaurant's central conceit is. And that's refreshing.

Located on a corner lot steps from downtown Campbell, the colorful restaurant opened in December with a menu centered on fine cheeses and Italian salumi, or high-end cured meats. Nothing particularly earth-shattering there. But accompanying the meat and dairy are free-flowing, piping hot flat-breads the size of minipitas. These are the tigelle, and they form the addictive heart of the meal.

Owner Elizabetta Benetollo, who was raised in the Veneto region of Northern Italy, explains that tigelle are a specialty of Emilia-Romagna, where for centuries housewives would pile rounds of dough between hot stones, cooking the breads right in the fireplace. Today, young Italians nibble tigelle with weepy Crescenza cheese when dining out, but free-standing tigellerias, which specialize in this style of eating, don't really exist anywhere—even in Italy, if we take Benetollo's word for it.

Now don't expect tigellerias to start popping up coast to coast. After all, the concept does have its limitations. First off, there's only so much sliced meat and cheese anyone can eat, no matter how tasty those cute little tigelle may be. By the time I finished my second meal at the restaurant, I was dying for a fat hunk of watermelon to cleanse my salty palate. I guess you could call it prosciutto overload. (And I'm a girl who, once weaned, went straight from the breast to the deli, so I've got nothing against sliced meat.)

But let's start at the beginning. Soups, salads and pastas are all available as first courses, and a little vegetable action is a good choice given the cholesterol onslaught to come. The vellutata ($6), a puréed butternut squash soup sprinkled with amaretti cookies, is a light and refreshing starter. Just ask for your soup hot. (On one visit two soups arrived almost cold.) The verde salad ($7), a mix of delicate baby greens, pears, golden raisins and walnuts, was crisp and juicy. The other salads all have cheese in them, which makes little sense. Why have cheese before you have, well, cheese?

A pasta course is also available in case you need to carbo-load for a marathon or something. The creamy, smoky carbonara ($14) was terrific.

As for entrees, 10 meat-and-cheese combo platters are available, and trying to make heads or tails of them is no easy task. Fortunately, servers aim to please and do so admirably. On one visit I had the etrusco ($14), with porchetta, two kinds of salami and pecorino, romano and toscano cheeses. The porchetta—and the prosciutto, speck and pancetta in another platter (the salumi palette, $18)—are sliced wafer-thin, and the cheeses are all very high quality. An all-cheese palette ($18) pairs six cheeses (Crescenza, Taleggio, Gorgonzola, Fontina, pecorino and Parmiggiano-Reggiano) with fig, maple-pumpkin and chestnut spreads. The sweet-salty contrast works well. And, of course, hot tigelle flow throughout.

Word to the wise: entree platters are enormous. If you order two platters for two people, you'll have serious leftovers for the next day's lunch. The exception was the skimpy grilled vegetable palette ($12).Why be so generous with imported meats and cheeses and so stingy with portobellos, eggplant and bell peppers?

The vibrant décor includes robin's-egg-blue paint, classical frescoes and a funky fuchsia chandelier. Wines from both Italy and California line the walls, and the Verona-born sommelier has taken pains to offer suggested pairings for each entree platter. You'll also find numerous wines by the glass for under $10. Another reason to linger: Italian movies projected silently by the bar. There's something especially civilized about watching The Bicycle Thief while sipping prosecco.

For dessert, Benetollo makes a killer mascarpone-topped meringue cake, as well as a sweet salami, which sounds disgusting but is wonderful, chocolaty and completely salami-free. The recipe came from her grandmother, who served it at her restaurant in Italy.

Finally, Tigelleria pushes the organic button, and they push it hard. From the "organic fresh ground black pepper" to the "100 percent organic De Cecco pasta," the word organic appears, I'm not kidding, 47 times on the menu.

Now pass the meats.

Explore Untapped Italian Cuisine

by Cathy Weselby

A new bistro has opened downtown that will challenge Campbell residents' preconceptions about Italian restaurants.
Tigelleria, located on the corner of E. Campbell Avenue and Fourth Street, offers an unexplored aspect of Italian cuisine, tigelle (pronounced tee-jell-ay). Tigelle resemble a flat English muffin and are served warm, cut in half and filled with cured meats and cheeses.
Owners Elisabetta Benetollo and her husband, Mirco Caramori, hail from Modena, where tigelle are traditionally served.
Benetollo hopes to dispel the myth that the typical Italian restaurant has "red checkered tablecloths and O Sole Mio playing in the background."

The restaurant, which was the former home of Campbell Florist, has been completely transformed. The interior is now a cozy bistro with deep sky-blue walls and warm amber lighting. A Murano glass chandelier hangs in the foyer and Federico Fellini films flicker on the wall behind the bar. The 40-seat restaurant opened on Dec. 7.
The genesis for Tigelleria came when Benetollo received a tigelle maker a few years ago as a present and started making them at home. She noticed when she made tigelle for guests that they would relax and converse more easily. Benetollo and Caramori envisioned a restaurant that encouraged socializing like they experienced at home.
When the Benetollos first arrived in the South Bay in 1994, Elisabetta Benetollo was "shocked" at the lack of nightlife. Now, she says she's seen a change, and more people are going out at night and socializing.
"It's becoming more like Europe," she says.
In Italy, Benetollo says there are more opportunities for meeting people and feeling part of the community. She feels that same community spirit in Campbell.
"We've been welcomed very warmly by the people in Campbell," Benetollo says.

The menu at Tigelleria includes both traditional and nontraditional entrées, pastas, soups, salads and desserts.
Traditional entrées range from a selection of Italian cold cuts, cheeses or grilled vegetables served with warm tigelle. The last tigelle is traditionally served with Nutella, a chocolate hazelnut spread, as dessert.
The more unconventional combinations were created by sommelier Bernardo Pasquali, a chemistry professor who experiments with flavor combinations, balancing authentic Italian ingredients for the American palate. The "Red Ferrari" entrée has aged Parmesan cheese sprinkled with 15-year aged balsamic vinegar and prosciutto di Parma.
Pasquali includes suggestions of Italian and Californian wines for pairing with the entrées.
"We strive to create the perfect union of flavors," Benetollo says.
She explains that the right combination of food and wine is important.
"If you have a sweet, creamy tiramisu with a dry champagne, the tastes fight each other," Benetollo says, citing an example of an incompatible pairing.
All of the meats and cheeses are imported from Italy, and 70 percent of the ingredients used are organic. Benetollo says they are looking for distributors of organic salami and prosciutto to increase the percentage.
She acknowledges that using imported ingredients is a challenge now, given the high euro exchange rate, and says they have worked to balance price and quality.

Benetollo knows she is offering the community something different, and she hopes that people will take the opportunity to try simple food and "just enjoy the flavor."