Birthday Cake at Calagrana

Now, we’ve detailed the Calagrana eating experience (and how delicious it is), and the Calagrana cooking class experience (and how much we learned and had fun), but I wanted to drop up a quick post to mention the Calagrana, well, personal experience I suppose—and how sweet it is. By the personal experience, I mean how well the folks at Calagrana (Albie and Ely, their kids, and occasional staff) treat all the guests. Like family, if you have a welcoming, friendly, family. For my example de jour, let me take you to a recent visit we had there, when we brought Jon and Nicole Sholly (who, if you’ve been reading the blog at all, you know were recently here in the Upper Tiber visiting us) there for dinner. It was Nicole’s 40th birthday, and not only did Calagrana have some off-menu veggie food for us (as always), but they also made Nicole a special cake. Look how excited she is:

And look at how amazing the cake is (all personalized and pretty):

After she blew out the candle, Ely took the cake back and cut us off slices, and then the slices came out with plates that had personalized Nicole b-day messages as well (and the messages were written in chocolate. Really):

The cake was more than a normal cake, too, as it had layers of chocolate cake, cream, filo dough, deliciousness, and strawberries. It was so wonderful of them to go to such lengths for Nicole’s b-day—but this just points out what I mean by how the Calagrana posse goes to extraordinary lengths to treat guests at the restaurant in a memorable manner. I realize I’ve skipped over the mains but this is intentional, cause I wanted to focus on the cake. But let me just say these words: warm bean and asparagus en salata, veggie risotto, tagliatelle porcini, and incredible roasted veggies with the finest mashed potatoes I’ve ever had. Oh, what the heck, here’s a pic of Jon getting ready to plough into his scrumptious veggies and mash: