Cedri

Black truffle before the pass moves

Black truffle sets the register before the pass moves: Chef Emanuele Mazzella leads Cedri in Boschetto Vecchio, Perugia, inside Borgo dei Conti Resort. Since 2024, his station here has been Executive Chef, a role that asks for pace as much as authorship: the timing of a tasting menu, the restraint of a finished plate, the steady hand that keeps the kitchen from crowding its best ingredient. His cooking at Cedri uses black truffle less as a final flourish than as the central register of the dish, carrying perfume, depth, and a long finish without asking the plate to perform around it.

What can be seen here is the discipline of a kitchen built around control: seasonal Umbrian ingredients, produce from local makers and the resort garden, and a modern line that keeps the region close. The work belongs to a restored estate rather than a street-side dining room, but the authority still gathers at the pass, service by service.

Carnaroli, Borgo hay, grey cheese

The signature dish named for Cedri is Carnaroli rice with Borgo hay and grey cheese, a plate that gives the kitchen its clearest grammar. Carnaroli brings its own discipline; it holds shape while taking on stock, fat, smoke, grass, and dairy. Borgo hay pulls the dish back toward the estate. Grey cheese gives the finish a darker edge. In that composition, Mazzella’s method reads as Umbrian without being antiquarian, built from familiar materials placed under finer pressure.

The broader menu is a tasting format, with the restaurant positioned as the fine dining counterpoint to the resort’s more casual tables. The stated approach is modern Umbrian fine dining, supported by local sourcing and the garden, with black truffle as the defining craft note. Cedri also places an open-view wine cellar beside the dining space, not hidden away from the room. The cellar matters because this cooking works in registers: truffle, hay, cheese, grain, garden, glass. Each course has to land cleanly enough for the next one to carry.

A limonaia made into a room

The room sits in the historic limonaia, once a shelter for wintering fruit plants, now drawn into a nest-like dining space with large windows toward the Italian garden and al fresco area. Natural light does much of the work. It catches the flooring, the vegetation-led contemporary design, and the quieter colors that Spagnulo & Partners Architecture Studio connected to Umbrian material culture and 15th-century pictorial tradition.

During service, the room keeps its scale close. The pass holds the kitchen’s rhythm, the wine cellar stays in view, and the garden gives the plates a second frame beyond the table. Cedri is not built as a theatrical room; it is built for concentration. The strongest close to the meal is still the one the kitchen has already chosen for itself: black truffle moving through Carnaroli rice, Borgo hay, and grey cheese.