This is why interesting combinations with tea are born through proposals such as Sardinian fregola, cuttlefish and myrtle berries or Terrine of beans, melon, sage and miso for which Perlo has created specific combinations.

The dishes and the tea

The first course belongs to the Opera menu: «The Sardinian fregola explains chef Sforza, «is cooked in a sauce prepared with cuttlefish, which in turn are cooked with oil for two hours and then filtered and emulsified always with oil. In this case the maître pairs a green tea from the Azores: «It is called Esters of Bruna, it has a strong citrus flavor that marries with the lime notes of the strawberry and is characterized, in fact, by coming from the largest tea plantation in Europe. The Terrine of beans, melon, sage and miso belongs to the Leguminosae menu: «The bean terrines always says the Turin chef, «are made up of four different types of beans: borlotto, black bean, green and red azuki. These are boiled and seasoned with a bean miso prepared by our Turin colleagues and friends at Fermenta.To who have, in Moncalieri, just outside Turin, the fields where they grow and the laboratories where they transform the beans into fermented products. Ours are seasoned with this miso, but we also add the gelatinized melon water and the cooking water of the beans to the dish, with which we make a glaze that completes the dish”. In this case, the pairing is with “a Japanese white tea to which I add dehydrated sage leaves, infusing them for five minutes and creating, to all intents and purposes, a decoction” adds Perlo.

The cost of the pairing is 50 euros for the Opera menu and 40 for the Vegetale menu, which also differ in the pairings themselves: the first has teas coming mainly from Japan, China and Greece; the second from Italy, the Azores, China and Japan. There is the white tea from Nepal, rich in organic matter and grown at 900 meters above sea level served with scallop, citrus fruits and fennel or the night tea from Val d’Ossola, on Lake Maggiore: a black tea with three years of elegant and characterful aging that is paired with Tagliolino with avocado and lupins. And then there is the Japanese Kabusecha, shaded for eight days, the Greek Tsai Tou Vounon hand-picked in Epirus or the Chinese Da hong Pao, with notes of toasted walnut, grown in the province of Fujian and protected by the national government because its production provides work to 300 thousand families.