Today on Food on Fridays we follow up on last week’s discussion of our Verona traditional first night piazza, and move on to look at our traditional first lunch in Verona, which is always at a restaurant called Osteria al Duomo.

Although Osteria al Duomo has been our favorite restaurant in Verona for a number of years, I noticed today that I’ve really never mentioned it on the blog by name. There’s a reference to eating at a favorite place in this old post, and a reference to eating my favorite foods at our favorite place in Verona on my birthday in this post. But neither post names the place nor has photos from the meals we always have at  ‘al Duomo’.

I think over the years I’ve tended in general not to post much about Verona, because we come here a lot, and we do a lot of the same things every time. So, I guess it never occurs to me that I haven’t really posted about these simple things before.

But, since we’re been in Verona two weeks, and eaten at al Duomo twice already, you’re in luck: this time I have some photos of the meals.  Osteria al Duomo is a tiny little place that serves excellent examples of typical Veronese food, so the food is fairly basic, simple and very tasty.

For example, one of our favorites is a pasta dish with macaroni, sausage, and marscapone cheese uses the local tastasal sausage.  This is one of our typical go-to dishes in recent years; we had it at our first lunch two weeks ago, and again last week.  The funny thing was that I thought my photo from two weeks ago was blurry, but in the second photo below you can more clearly see it’s served hot and steaming, which can look like blur:

Macaroni with Tastasal sausage and marscapone

Steam rising off the macaroni dish

Here in Verona, as it the rest of Italy in general, a pasta dish is typically the first course, aka primo, and a meat dish is typically the second course, aka secondo. Chris and I don’t always have a secondo, although at al Duomo we typically get 2 primi and then split a secondo. We had different secondos on our two visits this month:

Cotechino with cabbage

Polenta with pastissada

 Cotechino is a type of cooked salami, often served with polenta or lentils, but on our visit weeks ago it came with a warm cabbage side dish that had a dash of cumin and was very tasty.

The other dish, pastissada is a traditional Veronese stew. It’s  made with horsemeat marinated — and then slow cooked — in a strong red wine.  Years ago I blogged about making this stew on year in Bolzano; my old post is about the oddity in our cookbook,  where it seemed like an automatic spell-checker had “corrected” pastissada to “pesticide” as the name of the dish. The real Italian name sounds a lot better, of course.

But I digress.

Anyway, as I said, Chris and I typical share one secondo at al Duomo, but we always get two primi pasta dishes and split them.  We sometimes vary one of the pasta dishes that we order, but we always get an order of the bigoli con ragu d’asino, thick spaghetti with a sauce made with donkey meat.

Bigoli with Ragu d’Asino

Both horse and donkey are typical Veronese meats, and these meats feature prominently in many Veronese dishes.  Our favorite place to get them in Verona is Osteria al Duomo — we’ve been going there for years, the owners typically recognize us (and split the seondo for us, as you can see from the pastissada photo above.  It’s definitely one of the restaurants we seek out more than once on a typical visit, and we will vary the items we order there up to a point. But Osteria al Duomo is invariably our “first lunch in Verona” tradition – we look forward to it every time we come to Verona.