Locanda del Falco

Since 2021 at the Rivalta pass

Risotto agli agrumi gives Pietro Carlo Pezzati, chef at Locanda del Falco in Rivalta Trebbia, a bright register inside a country kitchen built on broth, filled pasta, and the old Piacenza table. He has held the role since 2021, a present-tense appointment rather than a scattered biography, and the house around him asks for that steadiness. Locanda del Falco sits in the medieval Borgo di Rivalta, within the Gazzola municipality, near Castello di Rivalta and the Trebbia River. Its public life reaches back to the second half of the 1400s, when Rivalta served as a commercial point between the Po Plain and the Ligurian Sea, with markets, lodging, an osteria, and a currency exchange office.

Pezzati works inside that inheritance without turning it into museum cooking. The role here is chef, and the kitchen’s language stays close to the local grammar: anolini in brodo, pisarei, salumi, stuffed pasta, capon broth, beans, Grana Padano, and the measured lift of citrus where his risotto agli agrumi enters the conversation. The house does not frame his work through a published chain of mentors or schools. What it does make plain is the responsibility of holding a locanda where the village, the cellar, and the pass all belong to the same daily rhythm.

Anolini, pisarei, and citrus lift

The menu keeps to an à la carte shape, with Piacenza specialties carrying the weight of the program. Anolini con brodo di cappone brings small pasta rings into capon broth. Pisarei e fasò turns handmade pasta, beans, and tomato into a dish that depends on touch rather than ornament. Tortelli alla piacentina fold ricotta, spinach, and grated Grana Padano into pasta whose pleasure lies in proportion, seam, and filling. Around them sit salame piacentino con cipolle, eggplant and zucchini, veal with oil and capers, and homemade desserts.

The modern part is not a rupture. It arrives in the handling: tartare with topinambur crisps, the citrus in Pezzati’s risotto, and the kitchen’s willingness to let a regional dish keep its name while changing its light. Local sourcing underpins the method, and the Slow Food current gives the room a clear discipline: Piacenza flavors, handled with care, served without flattening them into nostalgia. The wine program follows the same line, with local, national, and international bottles set beside the food rather than above it.

The room under wisteria

The room carries the medieval hamlet in its bones. Cobblestone alleys lead toward the castle, and the locanda answers with fireplaces in winter and a shaded courtyard in summer beneath a 100-year-old wisteria. The mood is quiet, intimate, and rural without roughness; the walls, hearths, and courtyard keep the service close to the pace of the village. This is not a dining room that asks the food to perform against a blank stage. It gives the pasta, broth, salumi, and wine the company of stone, wood, shade, and flame.

At the counter and the pass, the work feels most legible when old Piacenza forms meet one precise adjustment: a crisp of topinambur, a citrus note, a broth kept clear. Anolini in brodo is still there, held between Pezzati’s station and the Borgo di Rivalta.