Stella Fong: On East Main Street in Bozeman, in the 1916 Baltimore Building under the black-and-white striped awning, the cuisines of Italy and Montana are flavoring a new restaurant here.
Tutti Bene translates to “everyone is fine.” Here in the Paul Duesing whimsical dining space, food is cooked by Executive Chef and General Manager Cesare Lanfranconi. In this 4300 square foot restaurant, the sunflower, coral, sage, and eggplant shades that grace the hillside slopes of Cinque Terra explode here. In this restaurant, Tutti Bene, where fun meets sophistication:
Cesare Lanfranconi: We wanted to recreate an Italian cuisine with the modern interpretation and one of the main aspects of Italian cuisine, it is actually to use fresh ingredients.
Stella Fong: Chef Lanfranconi highlights the bounty he has discovered under the Big Sky
Cesare Lanfranconi: We want to employ the nice flours for pasta making and we knew that here Montana is one of the best places where we can get natural organic wheat.
Stella Fong: The flours are used not only in making the noodles that go into their Fettuccine Alfredo de Roma but found in other offerings.
Lanfranconi: All of our focaccia, all of our pastas, all of our ciabatta breads and schiacciata breads we are doing with local Montana flours.
Stella: It is also a place to get locally grown mushrooms.Lanfranconi is working with Sporadic Mushroom, founded by Benjamin Dueling
Lanfranconi: We have a mushroom display here at the restaurant where we have a live mushroom display from tiny little mushroom. We show that within 5 days they grow to full maturity, and after that we actually harvest them and cook them up in our recipes.
Stella Fong: Chef’s cuisine also features steaks sourced locally. The prime steaks come from Allen Brothers and Wilkens Ranches as well as from Belgrade Farms. The bison striploin comes from North Dakota.
Cesare Lanfranconi: We wanted to support the community and have some of the best beefs and steaks money can buy.
Stella Fong: And to cook the meat to perfection
Cesare Lanfranconi: We also went to the extent of buying a piece of equipment that is a special oven. It is called a Josper Oven. And that is actually an implement that really showcases how good the steak is because it is a self-contained charcoal oven.
Stella Fong: A floor-to-ceiling glass wine cellar with nearly 200 labels from Italy graces the wall between the dining room and kitchen, while a sleek, curved stone bar anchors the dining space.
Cesare Lanfanconi: The idea behind cocktailing it was starting from traditional bellinis and limoncellos and the simple things like a Negroni cocktail, or we wanted to start from a classic martini but then obviously make it a little more contemporary using some other high-end type of spirit, including some of Montana’s production as far as bourbon and some local whiskeys.
Stella Fong: The result of creating from the classics is, for example, the Amaretto Smoked Old Fashion made with Jim Bridger Single Barrel. The desserts also honor the classic Italian sweet endings with a modern twist.
Cesare Lanfranconi: We do have a classic tiramisu, which is a recipe that I formulated through the years after battling who had the best tiramisu within myself, my mama and my grandma.
Stella Fong: The inspiration he derived is also expressed in the other dessert offering.
Cesare Lanfranconi: For the rest of the dessert list, we have again, some contemporary and some basic classic options such as the cannoli, like not your classic tube of pastry dough stuff with ricotta. We are doing it actually almost like a small pizza, so it’s actually around where we build all of the ingredients onto it. And then ultimately, we crash it as we presented at the table.
Stella Fong: Chef Cesare Lanfranconi knows what he is doing when he crashes a dish. His resume is vast and impressive, beginning with his training in Italy, then cooking in London, moving to Washington, D.C., to work at Café Milano and Galileo, and then opening his own enterprise, Tosca.All of his passion for food and cooking began in his native Lecco near Lake Como.
Cesare Lanfranconi: I always had a huge passion for cuisine, and that came from mother and the family. And traditionally in our family, my grandma was one of the first innkeepers up in the mountains in northern part of Italy.
Stella Fong: Here on East Main Street, Lanfranconi will continue to keep the Italian inspirations from his grandmother.
Cesare Lanfranconi: I just wanted to invite everyone to come down and visit us here at Tutti Bene. We are very proud to be part of the fabric of Bozeman and Montana right now, and we are really looking forward to integrating ourself within the community.
Stella Fong: This is Stella Fong for YPR News.
