Telephone: 00 39 0774 928 000
Address: Via XV Novembre, Cineto Romano, prov. di Roma, Italy

It had been a hard day's olive picking. We had exactly 252kg of plump little green and black beauties resting placidly in large, flat cardboard boxes that had once held salmon. The sun had shone brilliantly all day, but the temperature was now comfortably below zero. It was time for dinner at the appropriately named L'Uliveto.

You won't find L'Uliveto mentioned in any guides. It doesn't feature in 100 great restaurants of the world. It is not a place of gastronomic pilgrimage. It's comfortable rather than smart. It serves the local community and a few other well-informed folk who take the tortuous roads up through the Abruzzo to Cineto Romano. There weren't too many representatives of any of these categories the night we were there, a quiet Thursday in December. Two, to be exact, but the proprietor's family, several of whom had also been engaged in taking in this olive harvest, were dining in a room just off the kitchen, and they and the five of us, with the help of several children, made quite enough noise to fill the substantial dining room.

As we looked out into the dark, my brother told me that, in summer, the sensible thing is to eat outside on the terrace, which looks out over a sequence of interlocking hillsides and valleys. The sensible thing now, I reminded him, would be to order some dinner. So we did.

You've got to have the supplì (or rice croquettes), said my brother and his wife. So, naturally, I ordered supplì. Then we ordered tagliatelle ai funghi porcini as a pasta course, rather misleadingly known as primo piatto, as if supplì didn't really count. And for secondo piatto it was three grilled steaks and chips, one sausage and chips and one coratella - lamb offal - with a side salad of puntarelle.

Now that I write them down, the dishes don't seem that interesting, at least on the face of it - but that's the point about Italian food. For the most part, it's simple to the point of austerity compared with the British or French style. There aren't harlequinades of flavours to confuse the issue. You get one taste at a time.

Fosdyke ordered sausages. He got sausages, two of them. That was it. There were no vegetables to keep them company. They weren't moated with gravy or sauce. There wasn't even any mustard. They were sausages pure and sausages simple. But such sausages - succulent, bouncy, springing with sharp spice and rich meat; in short, sausages to celebrate.

The steaks, too, came unadorned. You don't often hear about the superlative quality of Italian beef, but in my experience, when it's on song, it's as fine, if not finer, than that from anywhere else. My brother checked the pedigree of the steak with the proprietor in some detail before closing the order. He needn't have worried. This was top-notch meat, superbly hung, superbly grilled, slightly sanguinaceous, tender and tasty right to the end.

Tender and tasty are two words that describe my dish of coratella, which have been diced into nuggets and then fried quickly in olive oil. It was splendid in every respect; not exactly sophisticated, but laying waste the ravages of winter.

The sophistication lay with the salad of puntarelle, dressed, as is the local fashion, with olive oil, lemon juice blended with a fillet or two of salted anchovy. Puntarelle is a winter salad item, a bit like celery, and it's prepared by slicing the stalks into long, narrow strips and then soaking them in water to make them go curly and crunchy. What with the sharpness of the lemon juice, the fruitiness of the new season's oil and the salty fishiness of the anchovy, it was a proper reminder that great food is essentially very simple.

The funghi porcini in the pasta that preceded these dishes had probably been frozen or bottled before being chopped fine, but when the tagliatelle is a good as these, then sauce of any kind is virtually superfluous. This pasta had an extraordinary refined lightness. It managed to be dense and delicate at the same time. Each strand was testimony to the care taken in sourcing the flour and the eggs, and the time spent on working the dough. (The finest pasta I ever ate was made by Maria Baratta of Licenza, just a few hilltops away, and she went at it hammer and tongs for 25 minutes. It made me exhausted just watching her. Well, this tagliatelle was in that class.)

The supplì with which we had started were exactly what an olive picker needs to take the edge off his appetite after a long day up a tree: solid and serious, with a frivolous centre of gooey mozzarella. I finished on a cheesy note, too, with a slice of pecorino romano of explosive pungency, and a tangerine.

We drank three bottles of rich, red Sicilian, which went straight to the nerve centre, and a set of coffees. The bill for all five of us was L290,000, or € 150 - roughly £92. That's not a lot, however you measure it.

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