Dama

The first decision at the pass

Federico Sgorbini sets the first decision of the menu at the pass as Chef at Dama in Cervesina, inside the farmhouse of Castello di San Gaudenzio. His present station began in 2024, when he moved from the muscle memory of Ristorante Lino in Pavia into the wider charge of an executive kitchen. At Lino, the work formed around pacing, station discipline, and the habits that keep a service clean when the room is full. At Dama, those habits sit closer to authorship. Sgorbini carries responsibility for direction, standards, and the daily method by which the kitchen turns local seasonality into a formal tasting menu.

The restaurant’s public frame is modern Italian fine dining, but the more useful word at the bench is control. Four Cheese Risotto, Cogli l’Oltre, and Come un cantuccio show the range he has chosen to work inside: recognition, structure, and a quieter interpretive register. Federico Sgorbini does not need to make those positions feel separate. The point is the shift of pressure from familiar forms into a contemporary kitchen that still knows where it is standing.

Five courses held in a tight frame

Cogli l’Oltre, presented at Dama in 2024, is the clearest statement of the kitchen under Sgorbini: a five-course tasting menu built on the stated meeting of tradition and innovation. The number matters because it limits the room for drift. Five courses ask each plate to carry its weight, and the sequence has to move without hiding behind abundance. In a restaurant with a curated wine program and a prix fixe format, that discipline reaches beyond the stove. The pass has to speak to the cellar, the pace of the dining room, and the formal service around it.

The approach is seasonal and local, with contemporary creativity placed inside a historic farmhouse rather than against it. That setting can tempt a kitchen into costume. Sgorbini’s better work, at least in the dishes named by the restaurant, keeps the inherited and the new in conversation: the comfort of a cheese risotto, the programmatic line of Cogli l’Oltre, the suggestion of pastry and memory in Come un cantuccio. The craft sits in those decisions, not in ornament.

A farmhouse room under castle stone

The room works at a conversational pitch, formal enough to hold a tasting menu, small enough for the gestures at the pass to matter. Dama occupies the historic farmhouse of a medieval castle in Bassa Lomellina, with ornate architecture around a kitchen that has chosen a modern register. The contrast gives the place its tension. Stone, ceremony, and polished service create one kind of expectation; the plates answer with local ingredients and a present-tense hand.

Sgorbini’s executive role is where the day-to-day culinary identity in Cervesina is set, and that distinction matters in a place where authorship and setting could easily blur. Cogli l’Oltre is the line at Dama.