Il Luogo di Aimo e Nadia ★★

Chic food, chic decor at one of Milan's top restaurants

Of all the top-flight restaurants in Milan (expect to drop around $120 per person), none is so beloved by its patrons nor so faithful to its cooking fundamentals as "Aimo and Nadia's place."

For more than 40 years, Aimo Moroni's cooking has been firmly based in his native Tuscany's recipes and traditions, but he's not afraid to borrow liberally from Italy's other regional cuisines. Above all, he is big on natural flavors.

Up at dawn to troll the markets for the freshest ingredients, Aimo cooks only with mineral water to avoid the chlorinated taste of tap water, and he avoids using oils, butter, tomato bases, or anything else that might detract from the subtle interactions of flavors emanating from the ingredients themselves.

He's also quick to pass any praise for his creations on to his suppliers: the Piemontese consortium that raises free-range chickens under strict quality controls; the Sienese butcher who carves his lardo from the region's unique "belted" pigs and uses only salt and time, not chemicals, to cure it. (Lardo is the fat that is usually trimmed from a prosciutto but can also be salt-cured to become a melt-in-your-mouth delicacy.)

Daughter Stefania Moroni runs the dining room with silver-platter, Wedgwood-china, bow-tied elegance, but it is service of an intensely friendly, not chillingly impressive, sort. The young sommelier Renato Baroni—who relishes surprising diners with unusual choices—is so adept he can even locate the perfect 26-year-old sherry to accompany Aimo's killer chocolate soufflé.

Aimo himself frequently makes the rounds of the tables in his crisp chef's hat and wagging double chins, checking that everyone is satisfied and pausing to explain some of the esoterica behind the preparation of each dish.

It's the mark of a good cook that he cares much more about the level of enjoyment of his guests than the effort or preparation put into the presentation (none of those needlessly vast plates with a leaning tower of food at the center surrounded by artfully drizzled sauces.) And it's the mark of a devoted food maven that his customers regularly make the long trek out to the 'burbs and don't mind being surrounded by the virulently colored modern art that a recent make-over introduced, not when the food itself is so picture-perfect.

Reservations are required; several days in advance is wise.

Favorite dishes

• Fresh filet or raw Ligurian tuna topped with lemon thyme and paired with fattened goose liver soaked in a Cabernet Sauvignon sauce.
• Thick puree of white cannellini beans from southern Tuscany flavored with wild herbs and served with sausage made from Siena's belted pigs, boiled chick peas, and broccoli rabe.
• Homemade extra-wide noodles in a sauce made from meat crumbled off a roast haunch of yearling veal and tossed with fresh porcini mushrooms from the family's own property.
• An "Etruscan soup" of white Tuscan cannellini beans, tiny green beans from Umbria, and farro (emmer, a barely-like grain) flavored by wild herbs and drizzled with fresh olive oil perfumed with wild fennel.

Among secondi

• Ligurian jumbo shrimp wrapped in zucchini flowers, coated with crushed Tuscan pine nuts, and fried a golden brown along with a medley of vegetables.
• Portuguese baccalà (salt cod) served with olives, sweet Campanian peppers, polenta, and bottarga (the salted, dried roe of gray mullet).
• Free-range chicken drizzled with a sauce of its reduced juices studded with white truffle shavings and five-year-aged parmesan, served with guanciale (cured jowl-bacon) and testina (a gelatinous salami made from the bits you don't want to know about) sided with a pasty Sicilian olive sauce.
• The kidneys of a sanato (a yearling calf fed on milk and egg whites) cooked in sweet Tuscan "holy wine" made from raisined grapes, flaked with black truffles, and accompanied by a slice of a savarin (sort of like bundt cake) made from chick-pea paste, green thyme, crushed nuts from Piemonte, and stuffed zucchini.

For dessert

• A hot, gooey, sinful chocolate sformato (souffle).

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