MICHIL'S NEWSLETTER
Lift facilities and future regrets
I walked into a bar a while back and was recommended a ‘revisited Negroni’ – I was assured it was delicious. The ice cube was different: rounded, no, pyramid-shaped even. I tasted it, and it wasn’t bad – but a Negroni it was not. So why did they even call it one?
My next stop was a tavern where, to my delight, they served pasta carbonara. The waiter, just as delighted as I was, went on to explain the dish was a reinterpreted version, employing jamòn iberico and the yolk of a goose’s egg – and you guessed it, gorgonzola replaced the traditional pecorino cheese from Rome. Why bother to call it carbonara in the first place?
In Sardinia I witnessed how a typical dish, the culurgiones, were proudly sold as street food. To my horror, however, these versions were made with pasta of different colours and an artichoke filling (!!!). Those were not culurgiones! The traditional recipe calls for delicious, fresh pasta, closed with a beautiful ear-of-wheat pattern, and with a potato and cheese filling – sometimes enriched with fresh mint – and nearly always served with a meat-based sauce.
In the mountains, I’ve seen polenta become a mousse, butter turned into foam (why does every dish have to have a foamed something, I wonder?) served with dried mushroom (why not throw in some prosciutto, while we’re at it?), and mountain cheese turned into a savoury ice cream on a charcoal cone and Australian honey. Maybe we should start building walls for bees, too. A fan of everything walls, Minister Salvini could take care of that for us.
Dear guest, had you ever heard of reinterpreted cuisine before? It’s an alluring concept, opening the door to reinterpreting tried-and-tested recipes, in our case, those from traditional, Italian cuisine. I believe it to be a depravity which hides useless detours, celebrations of innovative actions for the sake of it, where experimenting means distorting flavours, ingredients and, most importantly, our identity. A similar thing happens in music and, in this case, I’d force people who take Bach and use it to remix trap “music” to complete a course of studies at a conservatory.
It seems as though you have to revisit a dish if you want to be taken seriously but, more often than not, it is an exercise in culinary self-gratification which goes on to feed itself for eternity. The dish we eat loses part of its soul, severing the ties it had with its land and the history which shaped what it was.
The Italian cuisine found across the country’s mountains, hills, flatlands, from north to south, is deeply rooted in its farming tradition. It uses a few simple ingredients which have been enhanced over the course of decades, even centuries, by trial and error. A “poor” cuisine which, as Eugenio Montale himself wrote, knows how to enhance these ingredients to the point of ensuring the survival of men and women, most of whom were farmers.
The history of our Italian cuisine is made of dishes, yes, but at its core it’s a story of human survival: where we, as a society, stood our ground in often inhospitable places. In light of this, our food is incredibly resilient. And yet today we celebrate it without a second though and, by interpreting it, distort its very soul.
I wonder: how many of these TV chefs have read Pellegrino Artusi and his seminal work Italian Cook Book (Scienza in cucina e l’arte del mangiar bene)? I recall his “Vitel tonné”, the quintessence of Italian classics. Dear chefs, and this applies to our chefs, too, what were you thinking when changing a recipe which has been around for centuries, which goes as far back as the Renaissance itself?
It appears we have to create a new language, without an alphabet, whatever the cost.
Today technique, rather than food, is what matters.
Aesthetics take centre stage, in an attempt to tell the story of all times.
Mountains, seas, hills, cities don’t deserve being transformed into a stage for elitist cuisine, the star of a glutton play. And the playwrights are the entrepreneurs coveting to make a name for their hotels; the chefs, pursuing the stars attached to their names without ever lifting their gazes to look at the stars in the sky; whoever takes their seat at a table looking for nourishment for their egos, validation for being there in the first place – ignoring nourishment for their body and soul – and wanting to only pose, share, and post their contribution to this mad display of luxury, taking it all in without understanding what goes on behind the scenes.
This obsession for reinterpreted cuisine isn’t just a fad, rather mirrors a society which has lost sight of its limits and the respect for genuine things.
Today, tradition has become marketing’s plaything, a toy to satisfy one’s craving for novelty. Montale said that beauty can be found in the simple things in life, where even seemingly trivial and empty matters are bursting with meaning. Our era is one where trash resigns supreme, and we’ve forgotten one big truth – the act of living in itself is already an incredible feat. Lucky for us, poets are still around, despite being ignored and relegated to a corner of this big world which basks in the light shone by the research for futile, evanescent gratification.
And some of you, dear guests, will ask: “Aren’t you the same? Don’t you want to reach the peaks of haute cuisine?” Of course, and we’re incredibly proud of the teams working in the kitchen or restaurant who are committed to maintaining our Michelin star. Having said that, we live in an era where humanity is turning their back on its true nature and traditions. And we’re trying to find our way back to what makes us genuine.
And to do so, we have to know who we are, not run after meaningless fads, and ensure we always aim higher, towards the sky, where the real stars lie.
Michil Costa