La Fonte - Ristorante Vineria Enoteca, Acqui Terme restaurant review. “Without a Guiding Hand”

While sitting on a shaded terrace overlooking La Bollente, swirling a glass of Gavi and contemplating dessert, Taylor Swift enters my thoughts.

I am a fringe Swiftie. I mostly like her dancey stuff, but a few reviews of The Tortured Poets Department decided it suffered from too many ideas. A work in need of editing and restraint. I don’t know if that’s true. I just like my Taylor a little more dancey.

True or not, the theory is useful. Creatives often suffer from themselves. Writers and directors need editors. Musicians need someone willing to lift the pen and say enough or try it in this key.

So while deciding whether to order the “Snikers” semifreddo (actual spelling), it is regrettably clear that La Fonte’s kitchen suffers from the absence of a guiding hand.

This is a shame because almost everything else about the restaurant works.

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It occupies one of the best positions in Acqui Terme, something that causes some of its peers to succumb to mediocrity. Why strive for excellence when the city does the heavy lifting?

La Fonte is an earnest, intentional restaurant.

The cavernous dining room is countryside elegant without feeling stuffy. White tablecloths, low undulating ceilings and small lamps resembling porcini mushrooms lend an easy-going air of occasion.

A warm early summer breeze rolls through an al fresco, cobbled terrace that allows the piazza and La Bollente to do the talking. La Fonte doubles as an enoteca championing local producers, so grab a few bottles of Barbera and Ruché on the way home. The service is warm, patient and mercifully tolerant of my two-year-old who emerged from his afternoon nap vying for a gold medal tantrum before being pacified with an off-menu bowl of fresh tagliatelle, butter and Parmesan.

Everything points towards a restaurant that understands hospitality.

The menu hints at the restaurant’s ambitions. Fewer than twenty dishes are supplemented by a chalkboard of daily specials and a €50 tasting menu that relieves diners of the burden of choice. The menu is not without ideas: Castelmagno-stuffed gnocchi with brown stock and hazelnuts and chicken liver pâté with pickled celery. Nothing here suggests a kitchen short of imagination. Their take on Russian Salad — essentially, a Piemontese potato salad — is contemporary and neatly presented beneath lacey wisps of fried leek.

The problem is that the kitchen is determined to make things more complicated than they need to be, reaching for ideas before mastering its foundations.

We start with a complimentary duo of battered anchovies resting on pea purée. The gesture is kind but the thick batter dulls the anchovies which, for anchovy lovers like me, leaves me thinking less is more.

Their finger-food of fried artichokes and sage arrive greaseless and crisp but entombed in a dense batter like a burn wrapped in gauze. Lemon and sea salt would not go amiss. Then finally, punished by a week of rampant agnolotti consumption, I order the fish as penance. The red scorpion fish is described as firm but arrives anything but, then laid upon limp grilled courgettes with splodges and nipples of beetroot purée. Soft on soft on soft. This, and I say this with my whole chest, does not work.

In comes an eyebrow-scrunching celeriac marinated in chocolate, soy, miso and grapefruit. Those ingredients read like a dare, only to reveal a deflating study of beige. This riot of ingredients all cancels each other out, indistinguishable against the actual celeriac. No bitter edge, no brightening citrus lift, no umami depth. Forgettable. Did someone at the pass taste this and actually think, “well done boys”?

There is enough here — in the wine list, the soothing decor and the generosity in a child’s bowl of buttery tagliatelle (tasty, by the way) — to believe that La Fonte knows what it wants to be.

But it needs someone willing to encourage the promising ideas and challenge the weaker ones. Someone with the temerity to say: Stop, let’s get the basics right before trying to be pioneers.

I do not order dessert in the end. Instead, I take a short stroll to nearby Gelateria Bogoglio, whose gelato reveals how much can be achieved through restraint, hazelnuts, fior di latte and figs.

This lunch, with wine, cost €103, which, at this price, would send me next door to Ristorante La Curia and their slow-cooked baby octopus in a borlotti bean sauce, so memorable, I am still trying to recreate it at home.

At La Fonte, I would come back for the wine and a few Piemontese snacks.

Wine seekers. Roman architectural enthusiasts.

Number of visits: 1

Total spend: €103.

Licensed: Yes. Gavi di Gavi, €24; bottled water, €3; orange juice, €4.

Dishes ordered (€): Russian salad, €8; Ligurian artichoke, sage, €8; celeriac with Swiss chard, €17; red scorpion fish with courgettes and beetroot, €18; tagliatelle with butter, €8.

Liam is a food and travel writer based in the Middle East. He co-authored The Rise of Indian Food: Recipes Reimagined by Trèsind Studio is out now and available here. Published by Phaidon Press. Photography by Shresth Maloo. He owns EatGoSee and contributes to other publications. You can find Liam on Substack, Threads and Instagram.