Trattoria Losanna, Masio restaurant review: “It is like a homecoming.”
Losanna’s cooking tastes like the recipes lie handwritten in a fifty-year-old notebook strapped together by fraying tape and divine intervention. You know what, that’s fine. It’s how it should be.
Certain things speak of Home.
“Home” often means a family home, a place of birth or the place where you grew up. A place of parents and grandparents.
Most of my life is now spent outside my home country with a next to zero chance of returning.
To me, Home is a sentient concept. A place of belonging. It’s what one dictionary calls “the place in which one's domestic affections are centred.” I like this definition best.
For me, it’s driving to the Algarve and spotting that first glint of the Mediterranean Sea in the horizon. It’s the moment I quietly spy my mother stirring the alchemy in her pots. Home is the rush of green summer leaves whipping past the car while driving around the West Country. It’s the first brisk cider pulled inside a country pub. In Dubai, it’s the distant sight of the Burj Khalifa during the taxi ride from the airport.
Those are unspoken moments when my affections are centred. Those moments are home now.
Trattoria Losanna as a proxy for home
Italy is becoming a centre of my affections. Our house there—an aged, money suck—will become a home while my favourite wine shops, village markets and other creature comforts of life take shape and collect like memories.
Trattoria Losanna, a small, unsupposing restaurant built on a flat stretch between Piemonte’s hills, serves traditional regional dishes ubiquitous for a hundred miles.
Losanna is place of village gatherings fueled by platters of agnolotti—those pasta parcels stuffed with slow-braised meat, their crimped edges stained brown with sauce. The wine list sources from the vineyards practically within sight. Among it all, I clock a bottle of Trinidadian Angostura rum during my first of many visits, surreptitiously stored above the kitchen door like a wink and a nod to me. You’ll be OK here, it said.
Naturally, there is pasta: that magic of flour, eggs and olive oil that Italians bequeathed to mankind.
Losanna’s country decor is familiar, simple and cosy. Low-slung ceilings above floors of burnished brick framed by white plaster walls run three separate rooms where dining rooms large and small (almost always full) flank the sides of Trattoria Losanna’s reception stocked with wine, preserves and a polished Berkeley slicer.
Trattoria Losanna’s Piemontesi menu
Look elsewhere if you want cutting-edge cuisine. Remember, Piemonte birthed the Slow Food Movement as an emphatic rejection of modernity (specifically, McDonalds).
Losanna’s cooking tastes like the recipes lie handwritten in a fifty-year-old notebook strapped together by fraying tape and divine intervention. And, you know what, that’s fine. It’s how it should be.
Expect a lot of beef and a lot of veal. Maybe rabbit slow-cooked in olives and tomatoes or ground as a ragu with eggy tajarin. There will be tongue, tripe and those cuts often left behind. There will be pasta: a special magic of flour, eggs and olive oil that Italians bequeathed to mankind. Order the raw beef hand-chopped and shingled in black truffle. Debate whether to share the gnocchetti in ragu.
There are few vegetarian dishes, but they sing with as much delicious conviction as their beastly counterparts. Country-style agnolotti lysing with ricotta and spinach. Lasagna made with broccoli and anchovies, would you believe. There are artichokes if in season and pebble-sized gnocchi made from pumpkin and showered with Parmesan.
Trattoria Losanna’s food and wine
Dad and I get out for the just-the-two-of-us catch-up that evaded us for a week in Monferrato.
We order and share everything as Losanna’s portions are reliably large. Two men in stages of life where he does not eat as much as did and I should eat less than I do.
First, a fresh tagliolini with artichokes and bacon. The pasta is as bouncy as a spring, coated in a grey-green artichoke sauce fortified with smoked bacon. It’s the dish of the day.
Next a sliced Fassona beef loin cooked blushingly medium buttressed by an ice-cream scoop of mashed potato (seriously, look at the photo). We order grilled vegetables to stave off the gout; they are seasonally sweet and cooked with bite.
Dessert offers a plethora of choices. We opt for the mixed dessert trio of hazelnut and zabaglione cake each, and a pear and chocolate cake (yes, each). He orders the torrone (a Christmas nougat) and chocolate parfait, and I order the chocolate and amaretti Bonet (a traditional Piemontesi set pudding). Each tasty but not exceptional; the torrone is the strongest.
We waddle away satisfied, charmed by the service and determined to return. You do not come here for the meal of your life, but a future life in Monferrato would be poorer without it.
Trattoria Losanna, Would I Return?
It would hardly be a visit to Montferrato without a visit to Losanna. It is one of two restaurants that I would insist on bringing friends when they come to visit. Not because it is exceptional, but because it captures country Italian casual and I can leave the world behind.
Trattoria Losanna, Who Should Come?
Anyone between Asti and Alessandria looking a cosy meal in the countryside.
Trattoria Losanna, How Much Is It?
I did not take a photo of the bill, but here’s the break down!
Tagliolini with artichokes and bacon, €14
Grilled beef lion 500g, €30
Grilled vegetables, €7
La Spinetta Langhe Nebbiolo 2019, bottle, €30
Trio desserts, €12
Liam is a restaurant critic, food and travel writer based in the Middle East. He owns EatGoSee and contributes to other publications. You can follow Liam here on Substack, Instagram, Threads or BlueSky.
Trattoria Losanna, Via San Rocco, 40, 15024 Masio, Alessandria, Italy. Call +39 0131 799525 for reservations.
10/10 would order everything. And honestly, next time you go, I will be personally insulted if you do not return with some of that focaccia.