Megaron Restaurant: where the ingredient is the star

Irpinian chef Valentina Martone's garden cuisine pampers patrons for a truly unforgettable experience in the Calore Valley, Paternopoli.

Learned and eaten, this is the philosophy of Valentina Martone, chef and owner with her husband Giovanni of Megaron Restaurant in Paternopoli. It is a luxury to go to Valentina's for lunch, a privilege that is appreciated while seated at the table of the restaurant, which opens by reservation only for an exclusive and inclusive dining experience, because her cooking, of technique and creativity, draws from the family garden, adapts to the slow pace of the season and peasant knowledge. 

Authentic dishes, which Valentina prepares on the spot, personally going to pick vegetables, greens, and herbs, networking with local artisans, and baking bread a few hours before sitting down to eat. A cuisine that marries ethics (no waste), ecology and health in gastronomic form, without forgetting human well-being and environmental protection (no chemicals are used for the garden), two important and highly sensitive aspects.

The chef's ally is the area of Paternopoli, the village that lies in the Calore Valley in the heart of Irpinia, an area historically devoted to horticultural crops because of its fertile soils, as well as the home of wine, particularly Taurasi, which is elegantly expressed in this area. 

The shopping basket brings typical ingredients and a lot of biodiversity to the table: onions, potatoes, celery, zucchini, squash, tomatoes, chestnuts, mushrooms, truffles, legumes and more. Local market gardeners, for example, have selected over the centuries a spring broccoli, called aprilatico, with its characteristic bitter and sulfurous flavor, which became a Slow Food Presidium a few years ago thanks to the efforts of Valentina Martone, who has always celebrated the greatness of this gastronomic excellence through her dishes, winning over time the title of queen of aprilatico broccoli.

At Megaron it is precisely the ingredient that is the star, transformed then by skilled and delicate hands. Mythical are the soups in the cold season, homemade pastas, jams, pickles and preserves that are part of the restaurant's pantry. Today, more and more chefs are codifying the green cuisine of the good old garden as a new gastronomic frontier, a contemporary fine dining, to offer uniquely flavored dishes with the freshest seasonal ingredients, picked just a few meters from the stove. At Megaron, this cuisine has always been proposed, ever since Valentina and Giovanni took over the family restaurant in 2000, transforming it from a place devoted to banquets into a temple of "progress at the table by going back to the old ways," exalting the territorial agri-food heritage that grows with the cadence of the seasons. 

A chef's skill is not only measured in cooking a pigeon or a lamb loin, but also in knowing how to transform a freshly picked vegetable into a dish of memory. Accompanying Megaron's cuisine is a splendid wine list, where one glimpses memorable labels and vintages of unobtainable wines of Irpinian and Italian productions, which Giovanni, as a perfect host and passionate sommelier, does not hesitate to open. 

The average expense of a 5-course menu is around €45.00, while the cost of the wines on the list denotes a more than honest mark-up.

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