Dei Cantoni

Fresh pasta before the pass fills

Fresh pasta sets the first task; Michael Franco, chef at Dei Cantoni in Longiano, works from that bench before the room gathers pace. His frame is Romagna regional cooking, not a broad Italian shorthand, and the kitchen keeps its attention on ingredients from the area and pasta made in house. The restaurant opened in 1989 in Longiano, in the hills between Cesena and Rimini, and its name reaches back to “cantóun,” the poor quarter of medieval Longiano. That origin matters because the cooking does not treat refinement as escape from local memory. It works with the village rather than above it.

Franco’s present chapter sits inside a family-shaped restaurant with a long local hold: a traditional dining room, a covered patio, and a menu built around the kind of primi that carry a region’s handwork. The kitchen’s public recognition is attached to this address, including a Michelin Bib Gourmand for Dei Cantoni in 2025. Awards are not the point of the station, but they mark the same thing the room has been asking of the kitchen for years: freshness, value, and enough invention to keep a familiar dialect alive.

Rigatoni, strozzapreti, and the Romagna hand

The program turns on fresh pasta and Romagna ingredients, with the à la carte menu allowing the bench to lead rather than a fixed procession. Rigatoni with calamari carbonara gives the house its clearest land-and-sea gesture: pasta, baby calamari, pork cheek, egg, Parmesan, and grey mullet bottarga held in a sauce that needs timing more than weight. The seafood cannot linger. The emulsion has to coat without becoming heavy. Strozzapreti with eggplant ragu works differently, leaning into vegetable depth, olives, and burrata rather than the salt of cured pork and bottarga.

Elsewhere the method stays close to regional habit: antipasti with piadina, cured meats, burrata, fried zucchini flowers, and eggplant parmigiana; pasta dishes that move between ragu, seafood, and seasonal vegetables; a wine list curated to sit beside Romagna cooking rather than pull attention from it.

A medieval room without theater

The room carries the village’s age lightly. Dei Cantoni sits in a medieval borgo with the Rocca Malatestiana above Longiano, but the dining room does not turn history into scenery. It is rustic and elegant in the plain sense: wood, stone, warm service, tables close enough for conversation, and a covered patio when the weather lets the meal step outside. The pass has to work for guests who arrive for regional comfort and for those who came because the Michelin guide noticed the value of the craft.

That dual audience suits the cooking. A plate of strozzapreti can read as home territory to one table and discovery to another, yet the kitchen’s obligation is the same at both: keep the pasta alive, keep the sauce in proportion, let Romagna remain legible. At Dei Cantoni, calamari, pork cheek, egg, and bottarga return to a bowl of rigatoni.