Loide, Tricase and Farmacia Balboa
15-08-2015
What has always been a chemist’s in Piazza Pisanelli in Tricase, became a lovely cocktail-bar with cold food in 2014, which the three partners named Farmacia Balboa, tel. +39.0833.772585. In the photo by Cosimo Cortese we can see one of them, wine producer Francesco Winspeare. The other two are a director, Taylor Hackford, and restaurateur Mauro Arena. Left Loide Pappadà, the raw-diet chef working at Balboa as of this year
I’m not a cook, I don’t even use fire. I’m a masseuse. Yet ten years ago in London I soon discovered the use of hands in the kitchen. When I returned to my homeland, Salento, close to Leuca, five years ago, fate made sure this summer I’d be behind the bar at Farmacia Balboa in Tricase. More salads. People like them so here I am telling my story.
It’s all about energy, even in the kitchen. Salads are good when the vegetables forming it have a good energy. I prefer them in season because they capture the energy of the moment in which they are naturally born.
It all starts from this reasoning. When I dish out a salad I don’t think, my hands work by themselves, following their own order. I often tell people who know me that I don’t cook when I’m not in love. It’s funny but it’s true. When I’m happy and calm, dishes taste better.
When on Sundays my mother used to make homemade pasta or bread, if the dough was too hard she would give it to me so I would fix it, as my hands were warm and strong. If, however, I overworked it, she’d complain I had made it too hot, see? This is how I ended up saying that cooking is another holistic therapy.
This summer I divide myself between my office and the kitchen at Balboa. I lived in England until almost 5 years ago. After many different jobs I ended up in a kitchen, by chance. They were cooking lots of meat, there was only one chef, specialised in French fine dining, but I believed something was missing.
Smoked salmon salad with avocado, radishes, mixed leaves and olives in the photo by Cosimo Cortese
Ever since I’ve been here at Balboa I’ve been doing what I’ve chosen as my main job, massages and natural therapies. I go looking for flowers and plants that are as little contaminated as possible and use them to make oil, soap and unguents. And once again chance led me to this kitchen, in a place established in the summer of 2014 where once was a chemist’s. Here I returned to think about a fresh and light menu, made of all sorts of salads.
Women who, for a moment, leave pots and pans to tell us their experience and point of view
by
I discovered gourmet Finland
Raw diet is the new frontier
Order and cleanliness, Claudia guards
The alliance of women in the food sector