Ravioli Next To Stone Ruins

In a small street of Lund in an even smaller restaurant a man from Rome prepares real Italian dishes and creates the feeling of a busy ristorante.

One more group arrives to the already full restaurant. They booked for five people, but now they are seven.The waiters reorganize the whole place to set a bigger table for them. Meanwhile all the other guests can calmly enjoy their pasta and Italian wine in one of the first warm spring evenings in Lund.

It is a regular night at Gattostretto, a small Italian restaurant in the city center of Lund. If you want to have a dinner there, booking is required because the place is usually very busy in the evenings. The selection is very popular and the owners know that, therefore the prices are not designed for students with low budget, but the quality and the atmosphere are worth a visit once in a while.

“We order all the ingredients from Italy. The dishes are also our creation. We want to serve Italian food which is a little bit different from the usual – you can have that anywhere else. We want to give something that is unique” says Emanuele Bispuri. He and his partner are the owners and chefs since they came here from Italy and started the restaurant in 2007.

“We cook everything ourselves. You can see that this is a quite small place; this way we can pay attention to all our guests and talk a little bit with everybody” he adds. This seems impossible because the restaurant is very crowded, especially during the rush hours. Emanuele and his colleagues somehow still manage to snake through among the chairs and small tables to check if everybody enjoys their meal.

The list on the menu is relatively short but includes all the steps of a proper Italian dinner, from antipasti until dolciand caffè– not to mention the various wines and beers from Italy. “We do changes sometimes but there are some meals that are always there. Some people come ten times and order the same pasta ten times. If I didn’t cook it any more, they would hit me” laughs Emanuele.

Gattostretto is named after the street where the restaurant is located. The name is a wordplayed translation of Kattesund, the strait of cats. But the place, which originally was the tourist office and then a Swedish café, has a real historical secret too. In the basement you can find Lund’s oldest archeological site: the ruins of the city’s second important church (after Domkyrkan, of course) from around a thousand years ago. Besides having all the information that is needed in a proper museum, there are tables and chairs downstairs as well. If you don’t mind the lower temperature, you can get your dinner served next to the stone ruins. Together with the authentic Italian food, either the ruins downstairs or the crowdedness upstairs help you imagine how your meal would feel in Italy.