They say, if you ask any Italian to name the best chef in the world, the answer from everyone will be the same, “mama”. Home cooking is held in very high esteem here, its the pinnacle of culinary experiences.
There must be a reason why, in a country with some of the best ingredients in world and a population that lives and breathers food, there are relatively few so-called top class restaurants. If you look in the Michelin guide (2016), there are only eight three star restaurants listed in the whole nation. Of those only one is in the capital and none are in Milan, the business heart of Italy, where many of the richest Italians have homes.
I recently watched a documentary about the chef, Massimo Bottura, who owns Osteria Francescana in Modena (named this year as the best restaurant in the world in the San Pellegrino awards). The programme showed that his early days in the restaurant were very much touch and go as Italians, perhaps especially the Modenese, were not that interested in eating what chefs today refer to as ‘elevated’ food. Fine dining and Italian food were not natural bed-fellows. If the inhabitants of my adopted homeland can’t eat Mamma’s food they seem to prefer eat at a local trattoria rather than a posh restaurant. Tagliatelle al ragu depends on the quality of the pasta and the flavour of the rich sauce rather than on how it was re-intrepreted by the chef and refined beyond all recognition.
Don’t get me wrong, I once had the pleasure of eating at Osteria Francescana and I loved it. What Bottura does with local food is very exciting to me – but I’m not Italian. My immersion into the culture of Northern Italy occasionally requires me to stop and take stock of things like, why there are so few posh eateries.
I also frequently wonder why there are some many Asian restaurants, usually serving a fusion of Chinese and Japanese dishes. There are three or four even in our little city of Lodi and two of them I know quite well. I ate the other evening in Kokoro, which has recently changed its menu to focus more on Japanese rather than Chinese dishes. I know very little about Japanese food but I really enjoyed what I had. They’ve really managed to pack flavour into their food and combine a whole range of textures into every mouthful. It’s clean tasting food and as different from Italian as you could imagine.
The restaurant was full, even on a Wednesday, and not only full, but full of Italians. These were people choosing to eat Asian cuisine, in a relatively smart restaurant, certainly ‘posher’ looking than most local Italian places. You’d never see the same people in an equally smart Italian restaurant, even if you could find one. It’s been suggested to me that the locals prefer mama’s cooking and when that’s not available they’ll go the trattoria. When they want something a bit different they eat Asian food or McDonalds; all of this in preference to Italian fine dining. Only in Italy!
My Kind of Food 