Via Madonna del Carmine, 31
www.hotelristoranteilceppo.com hilceppo@cilento.it info@hotelristoranteilceppo.com

Closed on Tuesdays, open seven days a week in August. Holidays: ten days in January

How to arrive

Leave the Battipaglia exit on the Salerno-Reggio Calabria motorway, go on towards Paestum and then, after about thirty kilometres, towards Agropoli. Leave the “Agropoli Sud” exit, turn left, then at the first fork turn right: the hotel is almost in front of you, it creates a fork. You will find the restaurant on your left.

The choice of the holiday period of the Ceppo shows the positive moment for tourism in Cilento. This is the most important and renowned restaurant in Agropoli which, with the “Chioccia d’Oro” in Vallo della Lucania and the Ghiottone in Policastro, represents the high quality and traditional gastronomy in the Cilento National Park. It changed its day of closure: it closed for holidays in July as it happens in Irpinia or in Sannio because it was visited by traditional clients, but it was a contradiction for a seaside resort. In fact it is two kilometres from the beach and for this reason it didn’t draw the seasonal tourists whereas the regular clients were on holiday. The Cilento went through a difficult period until the Nineties but this year a good period has started, it is similar to the one in which the brothers Carmine and Sabato Laureana were apprenticed to the restaurant of the doyen of the catering in Agropoli, Raffaele Guariglia, where two sisters of Cisternino got married in 1963. So in 1976 the team, who gave life to the Ceppo, was born. It competed with the home cuisine, then with the one of the restaurants in Paestum. The restaurant, created just in front of the hotel, has had the merit of keeping a high quality in spite of the fact that there are many seats, they are more than one hundred. It has had the ability to keep up with the times thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of the new generation and that wasn’t done by the good restaurants twenty or thirty years ago. The young Maurizio Laurana has been one of the first professional sommeliers in the Salerno province and every year the AIS (Association of Italian Sommelier) courses take place in his restaurant. The wine-list is remarkable, it includes wines from Cilento, Campania and many original national and international wines. The grappa and distillate selection is wide and cared for. The cuisine has two typical characteristics of the Cilento one: the seafood and the meat. The wild sea from Paestum to Sapri abounds in fish, it offers all the kinds of seafood including the fantastic small lobsters from Palinuro. The seafood is cooked in quite a traditional way, that is lightly, in salt, it is roasted just for a few minutes, in the “acqua pazza” style, according to the catch of the day and the seasonality of the kitchen garden products which are used as side dishes. The ideas are simple but they are well defined like the fried calamari with zucchini or a seafood sauté with rusk and pumpkin flowers, the sign of the due attention to the excellent raw materials. Gourmets who love complex tastes will be disappointed: this is the only restaurant in Campania where I ask for the cooking to be in salt because I know the high quality of the seafood very well. Here the seafood is very fresh in fact if an amberjack, for example, is caught in Paestum, that is five kilometres from here, they don’t buy it. You can also find dishes based on meat like ravioli stuffed with goat cheese, “fusilli” and “cavatielli” (kinds of fresh pasta) with veal sauce, the mozzarella with myrtle, the roasted kid, the pork and the wild boar, the salamis and the vegetables from the kitchen garden which are used as side dishes. There is the inevitable delicious buffalo mozzarella, in fact within a stone’s throw from here there are dairies like Vannulo, Rivabianca, Barlotti and Torricelle where you can eat the products and visit the firms. You can finish your meal with the home-made desserts like the cake with almond cream. This restaurant is the Cilento version of the “Europeo di Mattozzi”, a temple of the traditional gastronomy which has just been revisited and whose wine-list and service are up-to-date (the prices show quality-price). Now the Ceppo represents a tried and proved place where you can stop when you pass through Agropoli. You could also visit some wineries like Maffini, de Conciliis, Rotolo, Marino, Polito o Botti, they are wine producing firms located on the hills surrounding the restaurant. The prices are moderate. You will never spend more than 50 Euros. In Rome you would spend three times as much, in Naples you would spend twice as much.