This looks like a picture of a happy group of friends enjoying a lovely meal at Locanda del Pilone in Alba. However, it actually look heroic efforts to get to this point.
It wasn't meant to start out this way.
How it all started . . .
We were in Alba city center. The GPS said that the drive up the vineyard-filled mountains to Locanda del Pilone would only take 12 minutes. Seemed easy enough.
As we drove and drove, the GPS kept "rerouting", and the time get getting longer and longer. 15 minutes? And now, 17 minutes? What's going on?
Pretty soon we were convinced we'd made a wrong turn. The road was getting muddier and muddier, and it was very, very dark.
All of a sudden, the car stopped moving. Whirrrrr whirrrr . . . The harder my friend pressed the gas pedal, the more stuck we became. Yes, the wheel was completely stuck in a mud trap.
Stuck with nowhere to go . . .
We got out of the car. A dog started barking. From a distance, we saw a few people stumble out to see what was going on, only to shuffle back into their rooms.
We tried looking on a map, but it was hard to see what was going on. Who could we ask for help? We had to drive to the airport early the morning to fly back home. We really, really needed this car to work.
Internet was bad on the mountain. It was hard to get good signal to even look up information on the internet.
My friend's daughter started to cry - she was quite scared.
We held hands and prayed.
Eventually someone's phone got some signal, and we found the phone number for the restaurant. My friend gave them a call letting then know that . . . uhhh, we were running a bit late.
After a few minutes on the phone, the restaurant manager said, "the Chef is coming to get you."
???
Relief
We almost cried tears of relief when we saw his car come up. It wasn't a big car, but the five of us managed to squeeze in. He drove us down to the restaurant.
As we arrived, the staff were super welcoming, knowing that we'd just endured a slightly harrowing experience.
"Welcome! Don't worry, everything is going to be OK. May we take your jackets?"
Our shoes were embarrassingly muddy, but the staff did not blink one bit. We got paper towels, wiped our shoes as cleanly as we could, and headed to the dining room.
With our permission, Chef took our car keys and promised worked with some other members of the team to help us with our problem.
"Just relax and enjoy the meal . . . ."
What a meal it was!
Amuse Bouches
The Menus
The restaurant has a full tasting menu (150 euros), "a la Carte" Menu with two courses plus dessert (110 euros), and "a la Carte" Menu with three courses plus dessert (140 euros). Our table went with the 3-course, with each person picking their own favorite courses.
Below are a selection of some of the courses we had!
Desserts or Cheese
Mignardises
Thank you Chef!!!
At the end of the meal, the Chef told us "good news! We got your car out. Drove it back down. It is right in our parking area."
I cannot even begin to describe how thankful we were for the whole restaurant's over-the-top hospitality. They made what could have been a horrible nightmare into a fond memory of one of the best levels of service we'd EVER received from a restaurant, hands down.
We smoothly drove back down the mountain (12 minutes!), and made our way to the airport the next morning without a hitch.
And this memory will stick with all of us probably forever!
