Alessandro Dal Degan

Coming Up

Fine-dining authorship at La Tana Gourmet is tied to executive responsibility and ownership of the line: Alessandro Dal Degan works there as Executive Chef and chef-patron. The cooking is built less around luxury signals than around a disciplined reading of Asiago’s surrounding landscape, with restraint, intensity, and local terrain shaping the plate. Place functions here as a working ingredient system, not scenery. In Dal Degan’s kitchen, flavour, texture, aroma, and surprise are drawn from the mountain environment with a narrow, deliberate focus. The craft position is clear: the landscape sets the vocabulary, and the kitchen edits it into service.

Where They Are Now

The current format at La Tana Gourmet is a single long tasting menu, with Alessandro Dal Degan serving as Executive Chef. Its structure is built around intense, decisive flavours and the deliberate absence of salt and sugar. That absence works as a technical constraint, leaving room for bitterness, resin, smoke, acidity, earthiness, and fragrance to register without the usual corrections. Foraged materials carry the grammar of the cooking rather than sitting on the plate as decoration. Herbs, resins, mosses, lichens, pinecones and bark are treated as raw materials with texture, bitterness, resin, scent, and memory. The cuisine remains tied to Asiago and its surrounding terrain, while carrying tastes reminiscent of Nordic cuisine: cool, sharp, and pared back, but grounded in its own mountain setting. Kitchen culture is also part of the method. Dal Degan states, "La Tana Gourmet is the result of a really close-knit team and continuous collaboration between everyone." In practice, that frames the restaurant as a shared craft system: ideas move through hands, study, tasting, correction, and repeated adjustment before they become dishes.

Signature

Infusion of fir bark is listed among Alessandro’s signature dishes. As a craft marker, it shows the kitchen’s interest in extraction, aroma, and forest material: flavour is drawn out, steeped, and made legible without relying on conventional fine-dining markers.

In Their Words “We were pleasantly surprised by all this because we did not look for the star: we see it as a certificate that gives value to our work and our daily efforts. We do what we like, we try to do it well and improve, and we do it differently.” “Basically, we use raw materials that are unknown to most people. Herbs, resins, mosses, lichens and pinecones are products that were once used as food for healing.”

Honors

Alessandro Dal Degan has received Guida Espresso: Best Emerging Chef in Italy (2013). Recognition for this work includes Michelin star for La Tana Gourmet, Best Emerging Chef in Italy (2013), and Featured in La Liste's top restaurants for two consecutive years. Read together, those honors mark a kitchen whose identity has stayed close to a specific set of choices: precision, exploration, and a sustained connection to La Tana Gourmet.