Brace, Cetara

Brace is the best restaurant in Cetara, a small fishing village on the Amalfi Coast between Vietri sul Mare and Maiori that is famous throughout Italy for one product above all others: colatura di alici, the intensely savoury amber liquid produced by fermenting salted anchovies under weighted wooden boards in the traditional method that the village has maintained for centuries. Cetara is the only village still producing this product at scale, and it was from Cetara — some food historians argue — that the ancient Roman tradition of garum was preserved and transmitted to the present day. Brace brings the same obsessive attention to local ingredients that makes Cetara's culinary identity so interesting. The spaghetti alla colatura di alici is the obligatory first course: pasta cooked and finished with a few drops of the colatura (never more — the flavour is too concentrated to use generously), garlic, parsley, and a generous pour of good olive oil. The result is one of the most intensely savoury pasta dishes in Italian cooking, with a depth of umami that would be familiar to any lover of Southeast Asian fish sauce but framed in the flavours of the Italian south. The tonno rosso alla cetarese (bluefin tuna prepared in the Cetara tradition), where it appears, reflects the village's historic relationship with the large tuna that were once netted in mass seasonal tuna drives (mattanza) in these waters. The setting on Cetara's main street, a short walk from the pebble beach, is unpretentious and village-appropriate.