This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
As part of a generation which was digitally superannuated a decade ago, I take a certain Eeyorish comfort in the daily doomscroll of the fresh horrors of AI. Did we really not see this coming? Who really thought that encouraging half the world’s population to produce free content for Meta was going anywhere good?
Yet how obediently we all posted and commented, curated our Insta brand, churned out our newsletters and Substacks and podcasts (all those podcasts), as though there was the prospect of anything at all at the end of it but a late-career pivot to security guarding in a data centre.
Still, there may be a glimmer of life left in the just-about-twitching corpse formerly known as journalism. Thanks to AI, restaurant reviewing may be set for a renaissance. Not, perhaps, a return to the glory days of the Nineties, when a raised eyebrow from AA Gill could close a place down, but a more modest, wholesome and genuinely useful public service: telling the truth about where readers might like to go for dinner.
The Marche is one of those Italian regions that Brits hop over on their way to the overrated charms of Puglia and Sicily, but its food, architecture and teetering baroque hill towns rival much that Tuscany or Umbria have to offer, without the hordes of Americans charging around what they will insist on calling “wineyards”.
Chalet Nuah is at the opposite end of the long valley that stretches out below Macerata, formerly one of the key cities of the Papal States, and I’d heard they served the best tagliata south of Florence. According to t’internet, the restaurant “offers a unique and luxurious experience … an enchanting getaway nestled in the picturesque beauty of its surroundings … where guests can unwind and indulge in a range of exceptional amenities”.
Chalet Nuah is a wooden shed with plastic awnings in the middle of a carpark off the Ancona bypass. At best, it looks like a place where local doggers might pop in for a hasty panino, but picturesque it is not.
The parking is more than ample, but anyone who booked in the expectation of dining under a mellow stone loggia overlooking a Piero della Francesca view would have a horrible shock.
Tables are cheap, scarred wood, lighting aggressively fierce. “Unapologetically local” might be as far as one could honestly go. What ChatGPT can’t tell you though, is that Chalet Nuah’s food is good enough to allow one to overlook the frankly hideous surroundings.
The Marche’s approach to food is emblematised in its most classic pasta dish, vincisgrassi. Possibly it was named for an Austrian general, Windisch-Grätz; equally it might just mean “the fats win”, and Chalet Nuah is not a place for the fat-fearful.
Their mixed fried antipasto consists of crema fritta, lozenges of deep-fried custard scented with lemon zest, fried sage leaves and olive ascolane, olives stuffed with meat fried in lard, then refried for good measure.
Like the restaurant, intensely visually unappealing, but the sweet-salt flavours and the delicacy of the batter were transporting, especially paired with a fresh Pecorino white, sharp with minerals and anise (and not to be confused with the eponymous Roman cheese).
First courses of cappellacci with fonduta cheese and truffle cream and fresh pappardelle with a white ragu of lamb were similarly rich and confident, the perky green hats of the pasta both silky and robust, the lamb sauce tinged with a cinnamony reminder of Marche’s location along the ancient Adriatic spice routes.
But the main event, the one the locals come for, is the tagliata, huge slices of steak, charred without, ruby within, served with melted lard (really) and chilli, porcini mushrooms or shaved truffle. It needs a carnivorous wine, such as the Conero Riserva DOCG, made with 85 per cent Montepulciano grapes.
Again, Marche wines are tricksy; Conero is no relation to the Tuscan Vino Nobile di Montepulciano but arguably superior, at least in the mid-price range offered at Chalet Nuah. Savoury and loamy, it wrestled the flavour from the meat before settling back to a suitably cheek-sucking finish. Devastating, in the best possible sense.
Puddings stick to the same ramped up traditional formula — poor old tiramisu prepared with proper respect, densely scented with Marsala and bitter coffee, and my own favourite, panna cotta with Nutella. Childish, obscenely calorific and unabashed with it, gloriously sugary, wobbly and like most of the food at Chalet Nuah, deceptively brown and beige.
Almost as satisfying as dinner, then, was the fact that whichever language learning model had generated the website gumph, it had spectacularly missed the point. Chalet Nuah is one of the ugliest restaurants I have ever eaten at, and one of the best.
“Unique” can actually mean something more than an ubiquitous AI slop rent-an-adjective; it can mean exceptional, unpredictable and as surprising as the sophistication of a brown lump of fried dairy produce.
Restaurants like this deserve much better than lazy online clichés because a human person who cares about and understands pleasure has put knowledge and guts into producing food that other human people might delight in. And perhaps, they may still need actual human critics to describe it. ●
Chalet Nuah, Via Piersanti Mattarella 62029, Tolentino
