This can't be right. It's Friday night and I am sitting in the sun-baked courtyard of Castel Monastero, the magnificent hotel and spa converted from a 12th-century monastery in the Umbrian hills, cutting into a succulently al dente ravioli parcel filled with Castelmagno cheese from a Gordon Ramsay menu.
What's weird about this is that I've just started a three-day detox under the auspices of spa director Dr Mosaraf Ali, the favoured holistic physician of Prince Charles, Claudia Schiffer and the Sultan of Oman. The programme began earlier with a full-body scrub of salt and glycolic acid, and a hardcore massage from the elfin but surprisingly powerful Martina, 'to prepare you for all that is to come'. What's to come, it seems, is a superb three-course meal (I could have had the £70 five-course tasting menu) washed down with a couple of glasses of crisp, unoaked 2006 Chardonnay from the surrounding vineyards that used to belong to the monastery. If this is detox, bring it on.
Oops. I realise my mistake on Saturday during my one-on-one consultation with Dr Ali. I should have asked the waiter for the special detox menu, devised by Ramsay and his talented part-Italian protégée Angela Hartnett, but governed by Dr Ali's stern control of calories and ingredients. I should have been contemplating black tea and cardamom mackerel salad or a cucumber and broccoli timbale rather than saffron risotto with veal ragu and iced liquorice parfait.
The wine was a mistake. So were the fluffy pancakes with acacia honey washed down with two excellent espressos at breakfast. If my bloated, booze-raddled body and I weren't such strangers to the idea of detox I'd probably have realised my mistake. Oh well, chalk it up to — ahem — research. At least I'll be able to compare the full-blown Ramsay experience enjoyed by some of the guests with the doctor's more austere regime.
The chalk and full-fat cheese pairing of Mosaraf Ali and Gordon Ramsay is essential to the concept of Castel Monastero. The building began life in 867AD as a monastery built by the Berardenga family, and was built up into a large estate by the Chigis, an eminent clan that produced two popes and a venerable Italian bank, and which took over the monastery in 1100 and owned it until 1970. The surrounding villas and vineyards were gradually sold off after that and the central complex used as a summer retreat for politicians, until it was bought by a quartet of businessmen and women under the name Eleganzia, and opened as a hotel last year.
The conversion, by design firm HBA and architect Patrizia Quartero, is sensitive and immaculate, all you would expect from a five-star hotel. Vast suites with high terracotta ceilings, downpour showers and widescreen TVs overlook lush green valleys and distant dramatic hills. The bar is on the site of the old graveyard, the spa — overlooking three black granite open-air swimming pools — is housed in the former stable block, and some of the wealthy guests might like to know that they are paying through the snout to stay in suites that were once pigsties. Since many guests are Italian and devoutly Catholic, mass is celebrated in the chapel beside the bar.
But since it's 200km from the nearest airports at Florence and Pisa, Castel Monastero has to be an international destination in its own right. So while executive chef Fabrizio Peruzzi runs a kitchen serving gourmet Tuscan cuisine in the cellar, Ramsay's name on the menu of the second restaurant, La Contrada, provides a secondary lure to international travellers and grand-tour gourmets.
