The Med in the Alps out in the Many ‘Grotto’ Restaurants
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The Good Life Travel 109 The colourful village of Ascona sits between Lake Maggiore and the imposing Alps the Eden Roc, there is a distinctive Ticinese cuisine waiting to be sought The Med in the Alps out in the many ‘grotto’ restaurants. Typical Ticinese dishes include pork Ascona on Lake Maggiore blends Swiss and Italian cultures ribs, pork cheeks in beer sauce, and risotto with pan-fried fish fillets and makes the most of the surrounding water and mountains and sage. ‘Loto’ risotto rice has been cultivated since 1997 on the headland between Ascona and Locarno. To get a true sense of the region, you need to ascend to the peak of the by Christopher Silvester – consultant editor for Spear’s Cardada mountain, ‘the Pearl of Lake Maggiore’. It’s just a five-minute drive up from Locarno to Orselina, where you board a cable car for a five-minute ride up to Cardada at 1,340 metres. From there you can hike up or take the chairlift to Cimetta at 1,670m. The view from this point is spectacular. After a 30-minute hike down a AKING UP IN my room at while the soaring slopes that surround mountain path, we reached the Wthe Hotel Eden Roc, Ascona, the lake and the meadows to be found hostel-restaurant Capanna ‘Lo I gazed upon the magnificence of at higher altitudes are Alpine in Stallone’, where we ordered beer and Lake Maggiore (‘Greater Lake’), the character. The food is Italian, with a mixed platter of cheese and northernmost of the Italian lakes. plenty to satisfy pasta-lovers, but it charcuterie, followed by a selection With the mountain slopes and the also has a mountain identity. of polenta gratinata dishes. The village of Ronco sopra Ascona visible to Built in 1971, the Eden Roc today hostess offered us a homemade my right, I looked out across a row of has three sections, 95 rooms and four grappa and a homemade limoncello. palm trees towards the lake’s horizon. restaurants: the Eden Roc restaurant, The Eden Roc hotel provides This lake with the Italian name, into where breakfast is taken, serves electric-assisted bicycles for its guests. which the Swiss river Maggia flows, is French cuisine for dinner; La Casetta, We cycled past other hotels, crossed 65km long, and most of it is in Italy. in a separate villa, offers ‘the best of the Maggia river into Locarno, passed But I am staying in Ascona, a village lake and shore’; La Brezza is more through the cobbled Piazza Grande at the lake’s northernmost tip, in the Mediterranean in style and cuisine; of the Old Town, which plays host to Swiss canton of Ticino. Ascona is and Marina has gone for a retro a weekly market as well as open-air semi-detached, across a canal that Seventies look and a refined menu of concerts and open-air screenings runs between them, from the town pasta, meat and fish. The hotel’s spa during the annual film festival. S of Locarno, to which I have travelled runs beneath the different sections. Hotel Eden Roc, Ascona, offers double by rail from Zurich Airport, a About 20 minutes by speedboat rooms from CHF315 (approx £250), based picturesque journey of just over two from the Eden Roc are the Brissago on two people sharing on a B&B basis. Tel (+41) 91 785 7171 | Web edenroc.ch hours, with a brief change of trains. Islands, and a little beyond that is the Swiss flies direct from Heathrow to Zurich. Ascona-Locarno is a curious hybrid small town of Brissago, with its cigar All-inclusive fares start from £74 one-way. of national cultures. The atmospherics factory. The islands themselves are Tel 0345 601 0956 | Web swiss.com and the sub-tropical climate conjure definitely worth an excursion. up memories of the Mediterranean, Elsewhere beyond the confines of .