Dining with Renzi and Bottura

«We’re coming». A text message from Giuseppe Sala, sole commissioner of Expo 2015, to Massimo Bottura at lunch time: he’s coming to the Identità Expo S.Pellegrino restaurant with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Maurizio Martina, Minister for Agricultural and Food Policies. Without overdoing it with celebrations, this is indeed a reason to be proud for us at Identità: for sure, on the day of Expo’s debut, the Prime Minister must have had a diary overflowing with lunch invitations. Yet he chose Bottura’s tortellini for himself, his colleagues and his daughter.

This is the high point in the first day of our Expo, a passionate semester we will try to tell you about day by day, inside and outside the walls of our two-floor temporary restaurant, which, if a good beginning bodes well, is destined to represent Ithaca for many friends and people we don’t yet know, eager to pop by between one visit and the other to the other pavilions.

For us, the role of star performer of the day goes to Massimo Bottura: in the morning, the chef from Osteria Francescana was unfettered next to Matteo Renzi and Giorgio Napolitano (on the chef’s facebook profile there’s a selfie destined to remain memorable), young men and women (with or without veil) from the Emirates, with captain Zanetti and Hernanes. He’s beaming because he’s long waited this moment. And it is not just any moment for the chef who today represents Italian cuisine in the world better than anyone else.

«The future of cooking must be based on culture», was his argument with the guests in the restaurant (which was fully booked) when he opened the lunch, «which generates knowledge which in turn opens the conscience, and this creates a sense of responsibility. In my opinion, a chef does his job if he’s capable to move the spotlights pointing at him towards the silent heroes on our tables: farmers, fishermen…».

In other words, Bottura stays on top of the world with a humble approach because this is what is expected from the World Fair: that we all make an effort to look at the world in the eyes of those who are not always capable to see. «Wastes in the kitchen», the chef from Modena continued, urged by guests and television crews, «are no longer to be tolerated. This is why today I created a tortellini recipe using skins and all that was left from the main dishes».

He thus continued until the curtain call, with Bread is gold: «We cooked it with milk, sugar and breadcrumbs we would normally throw away. This is also a gesture with which we open [the use of the we form is entirely dedicated to the kitchen staff, starting with Davide Di Fabio] the doors on memories, those of any Italian child who eats this before going to sleep». Returning to your childhood is cathartic: «Just like Picasso who said that at 13 he would draw like Raphael yet it took him an entire life to learn to draw like a child. We cook like children». A formidable debut.

And we still haven’t snooped around, outside Identità Expo. Not even to better understand the incredible nutritional properties of palm oil, celebrated in Malaysia’s pavilion next door (praised be culinary relativism). By the way: the delegation of Kuala Lumpur fine-tuned a system to quickly assess the level of glycaemia with a sample of sweat. We could make a post-lunch partnership with Identità Expo.

Tomorrow and on the day after, at lunchtime and dinnertime, the encore with Massimo Bottura.

Identità Expo’s complete programme