When Summer Takes Italian Cooking Seriously

The week of 15 June arrives with warmth already in it. Monday opens at 21°C with clear skies and the week builds steadily from there, Wednesday touching 29°C and the kind of light that makes Belval’s terraces look like they were designed for exactly this. Summer is no longer arriving. It is here, fully, and the menu at MyCaffé has risen to meet it.

Five dishes this week, each one carrying the season in a different way.

The Cavatelli con Crema di Zucchine e Cozze open things with the Mediterranean at its most direct. Cavatelli, those small shell-like pasta from the south whose hollow is formed by a single finger pressing the dough, are built for sauces that need to be held close. Here the sauce is a zucchini cream, summer’s most abundant vegetable cooked slowly until it yields its sweetness and becomes something silky and green-scented. The mussels bring the sea: their clean, saline depth cutting through the cream and pulling the whole bowl toward the coast. A dish that tastes like the start of a holiday.

Then the Risotto con Fragole, Gocce di Balsamico e Stracciatella di Mozzarella, which is this week’s most daring and most rewarding dish. Strawberries in a risotto. At first this sounds like a provocation, the kind of combination that needs explaining. It does not. Strawberries, when they are at the height of their June season, are not sweet in the sugary sense: they are complex, slightly acidic, faintly floral and deeply fruited. Against the starchy warmth of a risotto, they become something savoury as much as sweet. The balsamic drops are the bridge: a few careful additions of aged balsamic vinegar, a product from Modena with centuries of history and a flavour that is simultaneously sweet, sour, complex and deep. And the stracciatella, that soft, shredded heart of burrata bathed in cream, brings a cool, milky gentleness that ties everything together. This is a dish that trusts the season completely.

The Girasoli Farciti di Asparagi con Ragù Bianco di Agnello are this week’s most beautiful pasta, in every sense. Girasoli means sunflowers in Italian, and these large, round, ruffled-edged pasta are named for their resemblance to the flower, a detail that says something about the Italian willingness to find poetry in the everyday. Here they are filled with asparagus, still in its late spring grace, and dressed with a white lamb ragù. A ragù bianco, made without tomato, relies entirely on the quality and care of the meat and its aromatics: white wine, herbs, slow time and patience. Lamb brings a sweetness and depth that beef cannot, and against the freshness of the asparagus filling, the combination is one of the most elegantly seasonal things on this menu.

The Lasagna con Spinaci e Pollo Profumato al Limone offer the week’s most comforting moment. Lasagna is one of the oldest forms of pasta in Italian cooking, its layered construction a metaphor for the Italian kitchen’s fundamental belief that patience and generosity, built up layer by layer, produce something greater than any single ingredient could achieve alone. Here spinach and lemon-scented chicken replace the traditional meat ragù, creating something lighter and more summery: the lemon lifts the chicken out of heaviness, the spinach adds colour and bitterness, and the whole builds into something warm and deeply satisfying.

And the Tagliata di Filetto di Pollo con Pomodori Secchi, Insalata di Spinaci e Salsa Yogurt Fatto in Casa closes the week with the same elegance it brought last week and the week before. The halal chicken fillet, sliced across the grain, served with the concentrated sweetness of sun-dried tomatoes, the clean bitterness of fresh spinach and a homemade yoghurt sauce that brings the whole plate into a bright, fresh equilibrium. The kind of dish that works at any temperature and on any day, but tastes particularly right when the sun is out.

Come any morning this week for your cappuccino on the terrace before the heat of the day arrives. The bar is ready from 06:30 and the first coffee of a sunny June morning is one of the quieter pleasures that MyCaffé does particularly well. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings until 19:00, Alessandro will be at the bar with MyAperitivo: a salumi board, tarallini and a glass that suits a long June evening perfectly. In this heat, a Grillo from Sicilia or a chilled Primitivo rosato is not a luxury. It is the natural end to a day well spent.

Il sole è qui. La tavola è pronta. ☀️