LAST MINUTE 2026 · October and November: standard rooms €80 per night for stays of at least 2 nights; 1-night stay €100. Superior rooms €140 per night for 2 guests.

Three Women, One Kitchen

At I Mandorli, family cooking has three names: Assunta, her daughter Susanna and her granddaughter Carla Maria. Theirs are the hands that have passed the same gestures along, one season after another. Three generations, living in moments far apart. And yet a handful of dishes keep returning to the table, with an aroma that everyone in the family recognises at the first breath. This is not a recipe page. It is about the things a family passes on from one person to the next, often without needing to explain them: a gesture watched many times over, a measure taken by eye.

Assunta, where it begins

Assunta lived to the age of ninety-nine. She was the matriarch of the family, and today her place in this story is in the recipes she left behind, and in the people who still cook them.

Ogliastra is part of the Sardinian area studied for its remarkable longevity. That belongs to the geography of the place, and we tell it as such. It is not an explanation for one person’s life, which remains her own.

The dish that represents Assunta is ghisau, a slow-cooked Sardinian meat stew. It asks for time, and it is left on the stove while the day goes on by itself.

You will not find the method here. The recipe stays where it has always been: in the family, among the people who watched it being made.

Susanna, carrying it forward

Susanna is Assunta’s daughter and the owner of I Mandorli.

With her, those recipes did not become something to preserve behind glass. They continued to be cooked, day after day, and passed on to the next generation the way you pass on something alive.

Her dessert is ricotta cake with lemon zest and acquavite. Just reading the name, you can sense the freshness of the lemon first, and then the warmth of the acquavite.

The name already tells you a good deal. The rest stays in the kitchen, and that is how it should be.

Carla Maria, between kitchen and land

Carla Maria is Assunta’s granddaughter, and she carries this story forward at her own pace.

At I Mandorli, her work moves between the kitchen and the land. They are simply two parts of the same day: what she watches growing in the morning often comes back to mind in the evening, at the stove.

Her dish is paccheri with confit tomatoes and cistus honey. The slow sweetness of the tomatoes meets the wild scent of cistus, the shrub that colours the Sardinian scrubland in summer.

It is the most contemporary of the three, but it belongs to the same family story, and you understand that at the first taste.

Three generations

Assunta’s ghisau and Susanna’s ricotta cake come from far back.

Carla Maria’s paccheri with confit tomatoes and cistus honey look ahead, without forgetting where they come from.

Three women and three generations sit at the same table, each with her own voice.

The rest makes sense at the table, when the dishes arrive and nobody feels like talking about anything else.

I Mandorli Boutique Country Retreat in Ogliastra, Sardinia: 9 rooms, Sa Barza pool, breakfast, almond trees and the quiet of the countryside.