La Tana

La Tana Gourmet is chef Alessandro Dal Degan's tasting-menu restaurant on Via Kaberlaba in Asiago, in the Veneto. It occupies the old Casa Rossa on the Asiago plateau.

Dal Degan was born in Turin in 1981 and studied at a hotel school before cooking at I Macchiaioli in Sesto Fiorentino. He is largely self-taught, without long stages in famous kitchens. He became sous chef at Gallopapa in Castellina in Chianti, then moved to Asiago, the town his mother came from. Twins work beside him in the kitchen, and the fourth partner, Enrico Maglio, is the sommelier and invents the cocktails.

Critics have called Dal Degan a cook-herbalist. His cooking draws on what grows around the plateau: wild herbs, flowers, leaves and roots, as well as resins, mosses, bark and mushrooms, used as the structure of a dish rather than as decoration. Fermentation is the other pillar of the kitchen, which treats the restaurant almost as a workshop for new techniques. Dinner is a single long tasting menu, and salt and sugar are left out on purpose. Without them, the bitterness of a root or the acidity of a ferment has to carry each course.

The Michelin Guide awards La Tana Gourmet a star, and the restaurant has entered La Liste among its top tables in consecutive years. Falstaff has given it 95 points. The mountain setting explains much of the menu, since the forest and meadows outside supply the ingredients the kitchen works with. A meal here follows the plateau's seasons more closely than any fixed list of signature dishes.