Antica Trattoria Stella - Sale Marasino

This is a great find. If you are not looking for 5 star cuisine but rather good home cooked food, I recommend a visit to the Trattoria. We visited this restaurant following a recommendation from a local and had a wonderful evening. The owner Piero, was jovial and basically told us what we should order. Made the evening special. Although we had booked, there was absolutely no one in the restaurant the whole evening. We sat down and Piero asked us what we wanted to drink. As we weren’t brought a menu we had no idea what was available so we just said ½ liter red wine and a coke. He brought us a whole carafe of red wine, a 500ml bottle of coke and a bottle of water! Okay ... Then he came with a basket of soft rolls and a gigantic block of parmesan cheese and said we should eat it. Hopefully not all, we were thinking. It was really good but we did not want to fill up our tummies before the main course. Next he came with 3 slices of pizza margherita (I didn’t think much of it but it was an appetizer on the house)! All the while joking with us and still no menu. Finally a piece of paper with photos of raviolis appeared green (spinach pastry) and white (regular pastry). I asked if he had anything else and he said yes but the raviolis were made by him. So of course we ordered raviolis. We thought that’s all the restaurant had and when we each got 3 big raviolis, we were glad we had the cheese and pizza. But no! He appeared with another piece of paper with 5 mains. Insisted that we had to order the fish, which one of us did. We had two veal steaks as well. These were served with a choice of fries or salad. The fish turned out to be excellent, the grilled veal steak tender. Didn’t want dessert but again Piero sort of said we needed to order Rififi, which turned out to be ice cream with liquor. The whole meal cost us €20 a person. Amazing! Another reviewer said he was charged €20 for just the ravioli. Not sure if there was a misunderstanding there. We had a 5 course meal with drinks. Again... this is home cooking so do not expect gourmet standards but everything was good. And most importantly we had a fun evening!