Customer Reviews
The best cover ever? - By: Kentish Woman, 30 Sep 2008 
I've never seen such tempting food on a book cover...I just longed to eat it at once! The recipes are all of a high standard, & the photography glorious. I have to admit that I have not warmed to the authors to anything like the same degree: their personal anecdotes seemed smug & self congratulatory, & I won't be booking a holiday with them! The excellent recipes are frequently fairly complex & time consuming, with many stagesin each dish, & the book is probably one for the more experienced cook & not for a novice
Good recipes, but not vegetarian! - By: Ephiny, 24 Sep 2008 
These look like delicious recipes, certainly, & good for anyone wanting to cut back on their meat consumption for health or other reasons.
However the recipes are most emphatically not vegetarian! A quick glance shows many include non-vegetarian cheeses such as Parmesan & Pecorino Romano, which by definition are made with calf rennet & therefore not suitable for vegetarians. There are fairly good veggie alternatives to these cheeses, however the authors seem completely unaware of the whole issue, which makes me question whether they have any understanding of what 'vegetarian' even means.
beautiful book - By: Mrs. A. Birrell, 06 Sep 2008 
The photos are beautiful, the food amazingly delicious & Malu & Alberto are charming & passionate about what they do. Having been to Montali - it's heaven! The only place i've discovered that i want to return to every year. If you want to cook delicious, gourmet vegetarian food - this book will show you how.
Tempering their enthusiasm... - By: K. Johnston, 25 Jun 2008 I feel compelled to write a short note to counter some of the enthusiasm of this book's (and the restaurant's) devotees. I have not eaten at the restaurantin Italy, so I can't vouch for its delights, but I ordered this book with some anticipation, & was very disappointed. While it appears that many like the design/photography of this volume, I found it really dated. The colour is over-saturated, the food styling uber-seventies, the format over-large & ostentatious, the paper glossy & off-putting to handle... This, quite apart from the recipes which are over-complicated & old-fashioned looking. They remind me of some 'gourmet' vegetarian food I hadin Rome once, which was enough to put me off veggie food for life. So stylised - & notin a good way! For my money, if you want to buy books on gourmet vegetarian food, try Denis Cotter of Cafe Paradiso, Cork, fame. His books are much more beautiful & tactile - & the recipes user-friendly & authentic - not the kind of ponceyness this book tries to proffer.
Yummy! - By: Wise Woman, 19 Jun 2008 I'm a vegetarian but my husband isn't & it is really difficult to find recipes I can eat but which satisfy him. I bought this book as previous reviews said this will meet this requirement. I think it does & the more I cook from it the more my husband agrees!
The pictures are really inspiring & make you really excited about cooking them. Although some of the ingrediants are impossible to get hold ofin my neck of the woods the recipes still seem to work with a few well thought out alternatives & substitutions.
I wasn't too keen on some of the pages dedicated to stories about their life. Quite frankly some of them are a bit too self-congratulatory & remind me of the "hilarious" stories people tell you about people who you have never met & have no inclination to. However, as a cookery book I like it & best of all I the receipes on the whole seem to actually work which is always a bonus for an enthusiatic but unskilled cook like me.
