When you get to taste our land’s flavors
Each local product has a favor that reflects the beauty of our land. Every piece of land has its own story to tell us with its locally grown products. This is the signature philosophy of the great family circle of Hotel Terme Orvieto, a perfect base for the representation of a reality that says "Italy" from A to Z, starting from the love for quality food at the basis of the "pappa buona" (“good food”, as we like to call it) that we proudly present to guests.
Particular attention to the processing and enhancement of local products, experience, quality and passion are the essential ingredients of our home cooking. A sine qua non that I’ve been always committed to as we all are committed to guarantee our guests just top-quality menus made of healthy and locally grown products. Needless to say, always in collaboration with my favorite right-hand man, our chef Massimo Fiocco. Did you understand who I am? Well, I’m giving you a clue in local dialect: sò el Paron! (“I am the Boss!”)
Jewelery of butchery created just for our guests
Please meet Tiziano! Do you remember me? I am the expert "Norcino" of the Hotel Terme Orvieto, as the others usually call me. In Italian, “Norcino” means an expert pork-butcher, and I’m called this way because salami, cold cuts and sausages have always been my passion. Produce them, stuff them, see them seasoning, and eat them, of course, has always been one of my favorite things! I love tradition and tradition cannot continue without the pleasure of doing it by yourself. And it’s essential for me to put all those little yet important secrets that allow you to make a superior product into practice every day with my own hands. It is a satisfaction that I can’t compare.
Like the satisfaction that I have when I make my own sausages, which I do several times during the year. I flavor them with an infusion of red wine and garlic to add that particular extra boost. That’s another reason why I love our tradition, because with you can add those extra flavors anytime you want in everything you produce. And when I say “we produce”, I mean that we actually do everything ourselves ("femo tutto noialtri" in Venetian): in collaboration with my team in the wonderful setting of our farmhouse “Valletta Paradiso” we produce our sausages, process them and stock them. We always help them season in the best way by using our cellar dug in lava stone. In fact, our farmhouse works for everything super natural: here we we squeeze our olives, twist our grapes and bottle oil, grappas and wines. Our guests simply adore these products. Plus, they also have an opinion, which is great when it helps you make things better. Once one of our customers coming from Liguria taught us to smoke lightly our salame into a stove where oak wood is burning. Here you have our own Salame all'Olcese.
Farm-to-table delights of the Euganean Hills and Italian delicacies
The beauty of our kitchen is that our guests are not only the first recipients of our dishes, but mostly privileged interlocutors to discuss with, exchange opinions and... to supply from! I think that few hotels could compare with our great variety of menus that we passionately have in our restaurant with so much Made-in-Italy-caring and love. What about our authentic Italian anchovies from Cetara, our fragrant Ligurian basil DOC, or the incredibly tasty Grana Padano d.o.p. coming from one of our guests’ dairy in Mantua? Dulcis in fundo, I’d also like to mention my favorite’s sweet biscuits, meliga pastries and Baci di Dama from Villar Perosa, Piedmont.
The suppliers of all these delightful dishes are nothing less than our customers! Thanks to them we can always have fresh and genuine products, key ingredients of good and authentic food, same as our kitchen, same as our home. Because that’s what we think about having our guests in our hotel’s restaurant: it’s like having them invited for dinner at your place. “Happy is that home that houses a friend”, they say, and you can’t but offer a friend all the best you have. All the best that our Italy can produce. Do you really understand how hard it is for us to go and try all these products around Italy? I love my job!
The Mediterranean diet in Abano: a perfect combination with spa treatments.
On the other hand, when in 2010 the Mediterranean diet was included in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, it was not only because we simply make good products. What contributed making it so famous were rather all those "skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions" that make our territory an exclusive representative of a true lifestyle that has no comparisons in the world. Because that’s what makes our Cuisine so special, the fact that is represents a true social interaction that allows us to get in touch with the nature that surrounds us as well as with our own traditions. Just like the times when we offer guests our grandmother’s gnocchi or chef Massimo Fiocco’s desserts, his great passion. Or when we take our guests to dinner at Valletta Paradiso.
There you can’t be formal. We want you to have a real dining experience, authentic gourmet discoveries. All the dinners that we throw in our farmhouse are conceived to help us share our adoptive family something about ourselves. The aim is to convey with our actions and dinners and products all the love we have for quality and for our rich traditions. For example, have you ever tasted my special Spaghetti with salsa Paradiso?
Actually, there’s just one Paradise here, in the name of this pasta. The rest is a pure hell! In fact, this typical specialty of the Carraro family, is quite spicy and literally drives our guests crazy, especially the Germans! And what about our giardiniera, an emblematic example of our passion for freshness? With us you will never find a ready-made mixed pickled vegetables because we want to eat real vegetables, and we also want to cut them all, scald them and put in oil with laurel, pepper and other aromas to make them simply great to taste. What about mayonnaise? If it is not homemade, we do not like it, as our guests don’t like it as well. Most of the things we offer, we try to offer them completely natural and home-made, whether you want our vinegar or super-tasty jams. At breakfast, depending on season, you will always find the right jam at the right time: like the one of cherries and figs you can find in July.
The smile of our guests, our greatest satisfaction
You wonder what is the goal of all this glorious effort? We just want to guarantee excellence and variety in our products since dining with us should feel like dining at home at the Hotel Terme Orvieto. Our hotel must be an oasis of authentic flavors for our guests. Not just a place for recreation and relaxation, but also a perfect breakaway location where everybody can experience what our typical Mediterranean diet stands for. They say that you cook if you’re thinking of someone else, otherwise you are just preparing something to eat. Here, when we work with food we always keep our clients in mind. That’s why we don’t like shortcuts and we’ll never like them. That’s why guaranteeing seasonal freshness has always been our passion, our first act of love and responsibility for our guests.
At the end of the day, kitchen is made of smells, flavors and fun, fun, fun. In one word: magic. A special magic, that can also allow you to travel in time and transport yourself in another dimension, in other times and eras, all made of ancient aromas and sacred rituals. The times when there was no other in the kitchen but Grandma Norma and her exquisite gnocchi.