San Michele Restaurant – Il gusto della felicità

Ristorante San Michele at Castello di Fagagna

The taste
of happiness.

san michele experience

The San Michele Restaurant

in the heart of Friuli – the authentic experience of wellness.

A place where flavours blend in with beauty, and culture with food.
You can discover the ritual of a gourmet‘s table, of a space which you can share in the quiet joy born of a perfect moment.
The San Michele Restaurant lets happiness resound.

Nestling amidst the ruins of the castle of Fagagna, San Michele today proposes a welcome which becomes a feast and becomes hospitality. A proposal for the curious, for those who wish to explore flavours, who love the warmth that comes from care, through the vision of the chef Fornaca, something that becomes food, hospitality and culture.

Here you will find the ancient feeling of commoning, of a community working together in the best way to offer customers a trip through taste, bringing together territory, ancient values and a vision of the future.

The San Michele restaurant is a seedbed for local cuisine and for those of the Italian wining and dining tradition, where you will find yourself a guest – welcomed, nourished, happy.

You will only want to come back.

The glance

The cooking symphony of the San Michele restaurant comes from the creative mind of chef Giuseppe Fornaca. Raw materials of the highest quality, chosen with the attention one dedicates to what one loves, turn into food replete with flavour and history.

Dedicated to ongoing improvement and to training its own staff, the San Michele restaurant – like the land which hosts it – is a meeting place of different experiences and worlds, with a powerful ethical touch, where kitchen and dining hall turn into a single ecosystem, where personal growth, conviviality and dialogue with the local context nourish each other.

The San Michele Experience is rounded off with the beauty of hospitality, when you stay as a guest at the Casa del Vicario (Vicar’s House), a few yards away from the restaurant.

The Taste

What do we look for in a culinary experience? Unexpected flavours, which involve us and which we find unforgettable.

Maybe something more. We seek a path, a panorama opening up through taste to our minds.

We seek something able to confer intensity on life. Here it is possible.

the Trip

A crossroads of lives, stories, professional skills, the San Michele Restaurant has made hospitality its key feature. The guest is welcome at all times, put at the centre of a proposal of food and wine designed to make him or her happy.

Those who work here, who every day build the beauty of the San Michele Experience, are at the same time the creators and the recipients of this generous familiarity they help to grow.

The Chef

Chef Fornaca’s journey began in Piedmont, where he studied, followed by his first working experience in France and then back, through several starred Italian restaurants. Pinchiorri, Cracco, finally Friuli, a land with excellent and unusual raw materials.

However, even more, he has travelled along a path of sensitivity, discipline, love for work, passion for the quality of raw materials, care for guests. Everything the chef proposes today – at the table and in his restaurant – is blended in with this life, rich in meetings, in chefs, in brigades de cuisine and places which have changed his way of seeing things.

For his kitchen, Fornaca mainly uses local products, which he gets hold of thanks to the collaboration of careful and meticulous craftsmen of taste. Recipes follow the seasonality of the raw materials. Professional experience and his Piedmontese background are the ingredients which complete his dishes.

Chef Fornaca has no love for the limelight, but every guest and every person who works with him focuses the beauty of their experience (at work or at the table) around the chef’s capacity for welcoming, appreciating, suggesting and making people feel well.

In the dining hall

There is something magical about entering the green park of San Michele after going up the unpaved road. This is the San Michele Experience, the feeling of entering a familiar, welcoming place, where love for the land of Friuli becomes hospitality.

The first to witness this are those who work at the restaurant. At whatever time the guest may turn up, he will find a smile, a glass, a proposal, he will find full satisfaction in a carefully kept, elegant environment, full of warmth.

Adriano

Adriano is the centre of hospitality in the dining hall, coordinating, listening, suggesting. His passion for wine has become an inseparable part of his job at the San Michele Restaurant. It is he, in fact, who chooses the wine list, the cellars which he visits personally. When you meet Adriano, you will clearly see how his passion has found room for work and life here.

"What strikes me, here, is how the chef believes in each and every one of us, and makes us shine, each in our own way. I am 28, and I feel I can grow here, and that we never stand still. It is the most interesting adventure of my life"

Luca

Luca is silent and pays attention. Each gesture shows care and interest for his guests. It is not a seasonal, temporary job.

"Here they take an interest in my personal training, there is a way of looking at work which you won’t find anywhere else, this is something that gives flavour to life.”

Aniko

Aniko never stops a moment, she is a local, and like so many other, she already knew the place before coming to work here.

"I always tell my friends to come here, even though I work here, she says laughing - the place is beautiful, the food is delicious and you can feel it is a fine place to be. Even the customers appreciate the harmony there is among us, and it makes them feel good!”

Alì

Concentrated, silent, you hardly notice him.
Alì does the job you see least in the kitchen, the first step in a perfect service

"It’s like being in a family here, everybody’s job matters the same way"

In the kitchen

Love of order, precision and strict selection of ingredients and raw materials are transmitted by the chef to his brigade de cuisine, which absorbs the original substance, adds to it and changes it, making it personal. Chef Fornaca, in fact, makes sure his collaborators all perceive the trust he has in them, so they can be truly creative.

Nicholas

Nicholas mainly handles the drinks at the cicchetteria, and is interested in multi-material combinations, it was this that led him to work with chef Fornaca