The Contemporary Chef’s Manifesto

Creativity is a happy hindrance. When you have mastered a technique, you’ve become aware of your means, you have developed a critical ability and most of all you know yourself, at that moment, on the road to creativity, by slipping on an over mature banana, by tasting a pesto made with breadcrumbs or a lemon tartlet that fell down, at that moment you see the world with different eyes, the eyes of a child hiding underneath a table who steals a raw tortellino from the cutting board, catching a glimpse in the darkness.

At Osteria we still look at the world from under the table, like curious children. In the kitchen we pay attention to the way in which ideas materialize… inspired by culture and motivated now as never before by social reasons.

Creating a new recipe is an intellectual action implying the involvement of raw materials, technique and memory. Summing up, we squeeze all this into mouthfuls of edible culture that taste like our passions, used as a channel to convey emotions.

Freedom of creating is poetry, in a life full of obligations in which you loose sight of the goal, of the points of reference. The secret is managing to keep a small space open for poetry so you can dive into it and create what most would think unimaginable. Making the invisible visible.

Quick thinking is what allows you to get back up right after you slipped, capturing the light and arriving on time at the appointment with creativity, because these trains leave at dawn, are always on time and won’t wait for you.

Being free to create is madness. Lester Bangs says: «Lou Reed is my hero most of all because he fights the craziest battles a human being could undertake. Which proves nothing but the limits of my imagination».

Creativity means setting what you have inside free, with no filters and no scruples; it’s the happiness behind a gesture, the scandal of emotion. As in jazz, it is the dissonance that makes a melody harmonious, the wisdom of an interval, of silence. The concentration and later the performance, the guitar string breaking and then proving to be an opportunity.

Contemporary chefs must live the present freely, so as to explore, go into depth, but without forgetting their past which is part of their culture, and use it as a tool so as not to be overwhelmed.

You cannot improvise being a great chef, but great chefs do improvise.