Cavallino

Two cooks at the Ferrari pass

Time and texture govern the kitchen at Cavallino in Maranello, a room built around Emilian memory rather than speed. Co-chefs Riccardo Forapani and Virginia Cattaneo lead it, under Massimo Bottura's oversight since 2021. Forapani is Modenese and spent thirteen years at Bottura's Osteria Francescana, joining young and working through the years in which that restaurant collected its Italian and international awards. The restaurant asks a cook to work inside a house with more inheritance than most rooms can bear, a former company canteen from 1950, reopened in 2021 as a modern Emilian restaurant. The task here is not to cover that history with flourish. It is to cook with enough control that tortellini, tagliatelle, cotechino, Parmesan, wood oven pasta, and the local table keep their weight.

The Emilian method under a modern hand

The menu gives the kitchen a clear grammar: a la carte, tasting menu, and set menu, with modern Emilian Italian cooking as the frame. Cavallino’s named dishes tell the useful part of the story. Tortellini del Tortellante brings pasta into the room through a Modena social project where young people with autism learn pasta making from local grandmothers. Tagliatelle with ragu stays closer to the long table. Crème caramel of Parmesan turns a regional ingredient into a dessert gesture without sending it out of Emilia. The craft here is not novelty for its own sake. It is adjustment, proportion, and restraint, the difference between serving a familiar plate and making it hold attention in a room where Ferrari memorabilia and fine dining share the same walls. The kitchen also works with wood oven-baked Roses Pasta, gnocco fritto with cured meats, beef tartare, cod with potatoes, and Nocino-glazed snails with rabbit kidneys and Salanova lettuce. Those dishes carry two pressures at once: the comfort of the trattoria and the precision expected of a restaurant with 1 Michelin star.

The room with engines in sight

The room keeps the Ferrari story close to the table. Engines, photographs, and Prancing Horse details sit inside a polished setting redesigned in 2021, with a modern-traditional atmosphere rather than a museum hush. The restaurant stands opposite the Ferrari factory on Via Abetone Inferiore 1, and that proximity matters. It is not scenery added after the fact. It is the original condition of the place. The dining room feels elegant but conversational, with the ease of a canteen remembered and the finish of a restaurant rebuilt for a different generation of service. Burano lace curtains, glass mosaics, perforated metal, and wood panelling give the house its surface; the pass has to supply the rest. When the kitchen sends out tortellini or tagliatelle, the plate has to survive the room’s visual noise and still read as food first.

What stays at the table

Cavallino matters because it keeps a local table inside a global symbol without turning the meal into merchandise. The restaurant can point to 5 total awards, including 2 current-year awards and 3 previous-year awards, but the better evidence is quieter: pasta from Il Tortellante, local sourcing, a curated wine program with an Emilian focus, and a kitchen willing to let familiar dishes carry the argument. The plate to hold in mind is Tortellini del Tortellante at Cavallino, Maranello.