L'Italo-Americano

italoamericano-digital-11-15-2018

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 20 L'Italo-Americano " G ualtiero M arches i believed that w hat is beautiful is also good and it is precisely the artis tic, in novating, dreaming and revolutionary side of Marchesi that I wanted to highlight in this documentary. I consider him the romantic hero of Italian cuisine." It is Italian director Maurizio Gigola, resident in San Francisco for the past four years, to have conceived Gualtiero Marchesi - The G reat Italian, a biopic retracing the stages of the art of Marchesi, the most famous Ital- ian chef in the w orld, going beyond the elements purely related to food, but exploring the creative research and the avant- garde philosophy behind his dishes. The documentary is told in firs t pers on by the great Milanese master, and by the great chefs who crossed his path: the French Pierre and Michel Troisgros, Alain Ducasse, Marc Haeberlin and Yannick Alléno, but also the Italians who worked with him, or who were trained by him, like D avide O ldani, Andrea Berton and Carlo Crac- co, as well as historical figures of Italian ospitality, from Gior- gio Pinchiorri to Arrigo Cipriani, from Antonio Santini to Carlo Petrini. The film is also a journey through the cities the Maestro loved the most, from his Milan to Venice, from Trieste to Flo- rence, and, of course, through his most famous dishes, the open ravioli, the fish dripping, the black cuttlefish, and the famous gold and saffron risotto. After the pres entation at the las t Cannes Film Festival and the release in 80 cinemas in Italy, the documentary has arrived to the American Film Market. Maurizio, how was the pro- ject developed? It took three years. I am a lover of food and cooking and, in about a year, I wrote the treat- ment and the script, then I pro- posed the project to four spon- sors: Andre Illy (Illy Caffè), Matteo Lunelli (Cantine Ferrari), Parmigiano Reggiano and S. Pel- legrino Waters. And after that, we shot for two years and the filming took place between Italy, France and Japan. Ho w w as s p en d in g time with Marchesi? We spent a lot of time togeth- er, we became very close. Get- ting to know him was a journey in which I discovered a lot. In the second phase of the shooting he started having health prob- lems, but it was fun to get to experience his energy. He was a peculiar person. Wh at s tru ck you ab ou t him? I didn't expect him to be so humble. I expected him to be more snobbish and haughty, but he was a very simple, yet sophis- ticated person in his way of thinking and in his approach to art and cooking. At the same time he had an illuminating sim- plicity. Does the documentary start from his beginnings? Yes, we go back to the 1930s, the years of his parents' Hotel Mercato in Milano, but this is not a chronicle of his life. In addition to his first years, we talk about France, which has been a determining experience for his growth as a chef and artist. And finally, we touch upon his return to Italy and his experience in Japan. Did he ever get emotional during the filming? His wife passed away in the course of the film, she had been sick for a long time and he was very attached to her, she had been a strong form of inspiration for him. And it was very emo- tional for him when he met his old friends, Giorgio Pinchiorri and Pierre and Michel Troisgros. He was visibly moved. How was the meeting with the other chefs? In P aris , w e met Y annick Alléno in a fun way. After a whole day of filming we were all extremely tired while Gualtiero wanted to go dancing with my young assistant. While looking for a "milonga," as they wanted to dance the tango, we came across the first restaurant where he had worked, which was Yan- nick Alléno's restaurant. It was 11 pm and we went in to say hello, they were very kind, they offered us at least 30 delicious desserts. The evening ended at the restaurant without tango! What was the essential mes- s age you w an ted to con vey with the documentary? I wanted to show cooking as an art form and not as a disci- pline or a simple preparation of dishes. And I think this was achieved also thanks to the help of cellist Giovanni Sollima, who wrote and recorded the sound- track. S p eak in g of mu s ic, Gualtiero was a big fan. He loved Bach enormously. Thanks to music he met his wife Antonietta, she was his piano teacher. His nephews are also excellent mus icians and his daughter is a w ell know n harpist. Have you eaten some of his dishes? Many, but actually prepared by him only the Milanese risotto that he had cooked for the docu- mentary. The famous gold and saf- fron risotto, the dish that was sold 100 thousand times? Yes. He had a different way of whisking the risotto, he would use an acid butter that after being partially defatted and soured was eventually cooked with onions, then cooled and filtered. This makes risotto very light and soft. Was he still cooking? No, he didn't cook anymore, but every night he was in the res tau rant overlooking and checking on everything. "Cook- ing is like music, there are com- posers and performers." He used this metaphor a lot, he said that the composer writes a score and a good musician must read and re-execute it exactly as it was written. He supervised the execu- tion of his dishes and the ideolo- gy behind them with great strict- ness. How would you define his dishes? His cooking was character- ized by simplicity and raw mate- rials. It had almost become an obsession in recent years, he had removed everything that could be pos s ibly removed off the plate. Some of his recent dishes were very simple and based on color, he emphasized the aesthet- ic choice of objects on the table. The choice of combining the dish with the actual plate was a very important thing. He told me: "What looks beautiful is good." And for beautiful he meant the aesthetic attention he gave to the appearance of food. Chef Gino Angelini told me that he was like an encyclope- dia of ingredients. Yes, he was extremely knowl- edgeable. He wrote many books. The most interesting from my point of view was the one about Italian cuisine where he didn't write about his recipes, but about those of our culinary tradition. He had written them for every- one, even for professionals, to approach them and understand them in the best possible way, because they were explained in a very simple, straight forward way. Are you working on other projects related to food? Yes, two other projects: one is about longevity and how food contributes to our life as a sort of preventive medicine; the second is about the relationship between mankind and vine in 8500 years of wine history, starting from the Caucasus and going around the world. SILVIA GIUDICI "What looks beautiful is good," Marchesi used to say. It was, along with simplicity, the secret of his culinary art Gualtiero Marchesi's taste for beauty in a documentary LIFE PEOPLE MOVIES MUSIC BOOKS

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