One of the most unique, authentic and locally sourced experiences you can ever have in Apulia is at Terra Madre (which means “Mother Earth”), in the UNESCO World Heritage town of Alberobello in Puglia, Southern Italy.
Terra Madre is a restaurant that is LITERALLY & FIGURATIVELY built around their vegetable garden, where they grow everything that ends up on your plate in their fantastic and reasonably priced 10-course vegetable-only appetizer “omakase”.
We started by ordering the vegetable-only 10 course appetizer. It’s normally 25 euros per person but in my experience one order can be shared by two people, especially if you plan to have entrées after that.
Then we proceeded to order entrées…
Desert and amaro were great.
After having tasted 4 out of the 6 entrées, it is clear to me that the strong suite of this restaurant are indeed the vegetables. Their entree dishes are not bad, but if that were all they served I wouldn’t be recommending it so highly. This is one restaurant where you wanna be vegetarian even if you are not!
I have since been back to Terra Madre at least 3 times and in a couple of occasions I thought they were falling a bit short, but it might also be that I’ve always been there in August and this being a seasonal restaurant (closed in the winter, by the way) I wonder how amazing and different it would taste in the spring or in the fall.
Here are some photos from my most recent visits:
