During a recent cooking trip to Italy, a friend, Pam Scott, introduced me to Buon Ricordo. It’s not a new digestive or a recently canonized saint, but a marketing concept to further Italy’s slow food movement.

The Unione Ristoranti del Buon Ricordo was created in Milan in 1964 and included 12 restaurants. Today, there are over 100 Italian restaurants participating and a few international ones in Japan, Australia, Vienna, and Hong Kong. Their motto is: Travel through the tastes and colors of Italy.

The way it works is each participating restaurant creates a regional dish, made with quality ingredients. These “house dishes” are then served on a specially designed plate, which the restaurants later washes and gives you to take home. These plates feature the name of the restaurant and an image of the regional specialty.

The restaurant we visited was in Udine where asparagus is the regional specialty. (seriously, it’s even in sorbet) Large framed plates with designs from past years grace the restaurant’s walls. Buon Ricordo plates from all over including Japan were framed on the ceiling.

One dish I had was asparagus ravioli, which sounds obvious, but which turned out to be surprisingly original. The ravioli were stuffed with egg yolk and laid on an intense green asparagus sauce. A strip of asparagus draped each ravioli and the strip was topped with a square of parmesan and a piece of truffle. The picture shows its elegance.

So I want to announce here and now that I’ve started my Buon Ricordo plate collection and I look forward to many more palate pleasing meals. If you have any Buon Ricordo restaurants to recommend, please send them to me.

Buon appetito!