What you don't see at the table

The Saturday no one sees

The day before is the real brunch. I start in the late afternoon with the sauces for the crostini — Bolognese tradition is not improvised. Every ingredient has its story. The potato cream and pea cream that will go under the poached egg are prepared the day before, because resting gives them a consistency that no written recipe can truly explain.

Then there's the table round. I bring them out one by one — they are repurposed pieces, each a different color: bottle green, gray, mustard yellow. The chairs don't match, and they shouldn't: each chair has its own cushion, each cushion comes from a different fabric, many I found myself at markets over the years. I arrange and rearrange until the ensemble gives me that right feeling — messy but warm, like a real home.

The cutlery is checked one by one. They are not new — they come from markets throughout the region, some have silver handles, others are just silver-plated with the marks of time. I polish them, arrange them, put them back if they don't look right. A bent spoon ruins everything, even if no one knows exactly why.

Sunday morning: the real backstage

The alarm rings early. Before the market opens, there's a window of about two hours where everything happens. The eggs must be very fresh to poach well. The oranges for the juice are cut and squeezed at the last moment — that oxidation that begins after twenty minutes is noticeable, and I notice it before my customers do.

The plates are warmed, because a crostino on a cold plate loses everything in thirty seconds. The American coffee is calibrated never to be bitter — a precise choice, because many of my customers come from outside and are not used to the strong espresso of Bolognese bars.

The menu as a story

I chose to create a menu that didn't offer too many choices. Two paths: Bolognese tradition in its most authentic version, and the same tradition with truffles — because Savigno is the Italian capital of prized white truffles, and it would be strange not to celebrate it even in the morning.

The extras are not afterthoughts: the lasagna on market day is an act of care for those who have walked for an hour among the stalls and feel like a typical Bolognese dish. The sweet trio with Erba Luigia liqueur is a tribute to Bologna — that Fat and generous city that never lets you leave the table without having tasted something sweet.

What remains, in the end

When the last customer leaves and the market starts to pack up, I bring the tables back in one by one. I collect the cutlery, wash and rinse it, and put it away for next time. Sometimes I find a slipped cushion, a forgotten cup, the mark of a glass on the colored iron of a small table.

These are traces. Proof that something happened. That someone sat down, ate, talked, perhaps breathed in the air of our hills with pleasure while drinking coffee. That's why I do it every month, even when it's complicated, even when I'm tired on Saturday evening.

Because an event is never just what you see. It is the sum of everything that remained invisible — and that, precisely because of this, worked.