Our love affair with Tuscany might stretch back centuries, but, just a short drive from “Chiantishire” and the landscapes beloved of British painters and poets,  the coastal region of Maremma in southern Tuscany remains relatively under the radar. That’s no bad thing for restaurateur Mr Dickie Bielenberg, who has split his time between Maremma and south London since he was a teenager. “It’s remote, rustic and charming,” he says. “For 10 months of the year, you can walk along empty expanses of fragrant pine tree-lined beaches. It’s very much a no-bullshit kind of place – full of vineyards, olive groves and lots of cows. The type of visitor who comes here isn’t the resort type of tourist.”

For Mr Bielenberg, it’s the region’s food culture that holds such appeal. Traditionally very poor, Maremma saw an upturn in fortunes over the past century with land reclamation spurring agricultural growth while its varied geography is home to food, olive oil and wine producers renowned throughout Italy. “Compared to most Tuscan food, Maremman cooking is very much about seafood. The stretch of sea between Elba and the mainland is a few degrees warmer than the rest of the Mediterranean, so you get varieties of fish you don’t find elsewhere,” he says. “Then just 10km inland, it’s mountainous, underpopulated and rugged and you have wild boar, venison and guinea fowl as well as amazing mushrooms.”

Aiming to translate the region’s charms to the capital, Mr Bielenberg – alongside partner and executive chef Ms Alice Staple – open Maremma in Brixton this month, with a focus on hyper-regional food and wine. Ahead of its launch, we asked him to outline the dishes that make Maremma so special.

“There is a simplicity and honesty about food in Maremma that comes from the fact that it was once very poor,” says Mr Bielenberg. “With a name that means boiled water, aquacotta is a really good example of cucina povera that is incredibly elegant – a clear vegetable broth made with just a few vegetables and a poached hen’s egg, flavoured with rosemary and served with saltless bread. Maremma is famous for its saltless bread due to the high tax the Vatican used to impose on salt. A lot of the food here uses salt from other sources, such as anchovies.”

“The Maremma cow is a hardy breed, famous across the country. The cattle are the size of a horse with big horns and have a low-fat, gamey quality having fed on salty, herby grasses. For the battuta, we take some chump steak – typically not one of the prime cuts – and chop it by hand, add olive oil, salt and pepper and serving it with some aioli and watercress to create something very simple with just three or four ingredients.”

“This year-round dish is a ravioli square filled with ricotta and spinach – two things readily available in the Maremma. It’s a versatile base served with a sauce that depends on the season. In the winter, we’ll serve it with mushrooms and truffle; in spring, it’ll be the first sprouting vegetables; in summer, there’s tomatoes and peppers; and autumn, radicchio and nuts.”

“The Maremmans do a lot of roasting or grilling of their mains – most restaurants will have the mother or the father on the grill outside waiting for the kitchen to prepare fish or big slabs of meat for them. This dish has just got four ingredients that are typically from the area and you don’t muck about with it. The octopus is fresh from the sea and you do very little to it before cooking over charcoal. Add that to a puree of fava beans – something else Maremma is famous for – and serve with a drizzle of rosemary oil. The quality of the olive oil is very important.”

“Mussolini reclaimed a lot of the swampland from the sea in the Maremma and this drained land is incredibly fertile. The terroir is shale based with a lot of iron ore and copper – when you taste a vermentino from the area, it’s got incredible minerality to it. It’s also here where bolgheri wines are grown, including the sought-after sassicaia. While most of the reds in the region are based on sangiovese, which Tuscans call the king of grapes, in the Maremma the locals created a new blend in the last century from bordeaux grapes – cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc – which has gone on to become one of the world’s biggest wines.”

**maremmarestaurant.com **