Paragon 700 Ostuni – boutique hotel with historic olive oil mill in the White City
The Table That Once Pressed Liquid Gold
The story of Restaurant 700 and the frantoio at Palazzo Rosso
The story of Palazzo Rosso’s frantoio
Palazzo Rosso has always been about the olive. Long before it became one of Ostuni’s most celebrated addresses, long before the Michelin Key and the kitchen garden and our Mixologist Leonardo’s gin bar, the lower floors of this pomegranate-red palazzo in the heart of Ostuni’s old town housed a frantoio: a working olive oil mill, driven by donkeys turning great stone wheels, pressing the finest olives from the Tanzarella family’s private harvest into oil that never left the building except as a gift to foreign dignitaries and high-society guests.
From the 16th century through to the 19th, olive oil was the liquid gold of Europe. Puglia was its primary source, supplying kitchens, lamps and apothecaries across the continent, and the families who controlled its production controlled something close to a monopoly on one of the most valuable commodities in the Mediterranean world. To own an olive mill was to own influence.
Don Paolo Tanzarella, who built the palazzo and who led Ostuni to become the first city in Puglia to declare allegiance to a unified Italy in 1860, was not a man who left things to chance. His family owned vast agricultural estates in the surrounding countryside, including what is now the centuries-old Masseria Il Frantoio, where the bulk of their olive oil was produced commercially. But the mill he kept inside his own palazzo was something different. This was for the family’s private reserve, pressed from the very best olives of the season, produced under his own roof and entirely within his control.
From olive mill to boutique hotel: the transformation
The logic was characteristically pragmatic. Connecting the frantoio directly to the palazzo’s walled garden solved several problems at once. Olives could be brought in through the garden gates rather than through the grand main entrance. The donkeys could work and rest in open air rather than in lightless urban cellars. The toxic byproduct of the pressing process, the foul-smelling liquid known as vegetation water, could be drained directly into the garden without troubling the opulent living quarters above. In the volatile revolutionary years of the Risorgimento, keeping the family’s primary source of wealth behind fortified city walls rather than exposed in the open countryside was not merely convenient. It was prudent.
The palazzo was designed, as all great 19th-century noble houses in Puglia were, as a world unto itself. The ground floor held the stables, the grain silos, the wine cellars, the mill. The family lived above on the piano nobile. Olive oil, quite literally, supported everything.
Paragon 700 suites: sleep where liquid gold was pressed
When Ulrike and Pascale first walked through the lower rooms of what would become Restaurant 700, they found the old mill still standing. The great circular stone base. The wheel that the donkeys had turned, season after season, for generations. They knew immediately they would keep it. As Pascale remembers it, the round structure spoke to them straight away, both as a memory of the frantoio and for something entirely practical. Its shape was made for gathering around. It would become a table at the centre of the restaurant, and that is exactly what it is today. Guests sit at it over a convivial dinner, often without knowing its age or its history, and it is none the worse for that.
Why choose Paragon 700 for your stay in Ostuni
Restaurant 700 and bar 700: seasonal cuisine in the secret garden
The remaining pieces of the mill were carefully preserved and moved into the garden, where they sit alongside centuries of other decisions made by people who understood that a building like this should not be stripped of what it was. Ulrike and Pascale wanted visitors to be able to read the building’s working past, to see how the frantoio looked before the restaurant took its place. Those pieces are still out there, among the dry stone walls that have stood for centuries, beside a secret grove of orange and lemon trees hidden from the street and cool in the afternoon heat. The original ornamental walls of the lower garden remain intact. At the far end, the old columns now shelter Bar 700, where guests sit outside for cocktails, drinks and dinner as the Puglian evening settles in.
Chef’s kitchen sits a few steps from all of this. His menu changes with the season and with what the farmers and producers of Puglia bring in each week, supplemented by tomatoes, herbs and whatever is ready in the hotel’s own kitchen garden. The olive oil he cooks with comes from groves that have been producing in this part of Puglia for centuries. None of this was planned as a narrative. It is just how the building works, and always has.
Paragon 700 suites: sleep where liquid gold was pressed
When Ulrike and Pascale first walked through the lower rooms of what would become Restaurant 700, they found the old mill still standing. The great circular stone base. The wheel that the donkeys had turned, season after season, for generations. They knew immediately they would keep it. As Pascale remembers it, the round structure spoke to them straight away, both as a memory of the frantoio and for something entirely practical. Its shape was made for gathering around. It would become a table at the centre of the restaurant, and that is exactly what it is today. Guests sit at it over a convivial dinner, often without knowing its age or its history, and it is none the worse for that.
Restaurant 700 and bar 700: seasonal cuisine in the secret garden
The remaining pieces of the mill were carefully preserved and moved into the garden, where they sit alongside centuries of other decisions made by people who understood that a building like this should not be stripped of what it was. Ulrike and Pascale wanted visitors to be able to read the building’s working past, to see how the frantoio looked before the restaurant took its place. Those pieces are still out there, among the dry stone walls that have stood for centuries, beside a secret grove of orange and lemon trees hidden from the street and cool in the afternoon heat. The original ornamental walls of the lower garden remain intact. At the far end, the old columns now shelter Bar 700, where guests sit outside for cocktails, drinks and dinner as the Puglian evening settles in.
Chef’s kitchen sits a few steps from all of this. His menu changes with the season and with what the farmers and producers of Puglia bring in each week, supplemented by tomatoes, herbs and whatever is ready in the hotel’s own kitchen garden. The olive oil he cooks with comes from groves that have been producing in this part of Puglia for centuries. None of this was planned as a narrative. It is just how the building works, and always has.