Redefining sustainability

Recycling and redemption. It’s weird to find out that in kitchens around the world people take care of the world and of the future generations. It’s what happens at Amass in Copenhagen and at Francescana in Modena, at Reale in Castel di Sangro as well as at the vegan academy in Santa Monica. Including Guido in Serralunga d’Alba and Ratanà. In order to leave the world a better place than what you found, or at least try to, there’s no need to be irredentist heroes (and even less so international terrorists), you just need to be Cesare Battisti.

Or Niko Romito. Two times ten doesn’t equal twenty but ten years at Reale, and ten editions on the stage of Identità Golose, a total of eleven dishes representing a research conducted at the edge of the culinary empire, in the “fantastic isolation” of the mountains of Abruzzo, as a self-trained chef, in a landscape that is free of the cumbersome shade of the great masters. So Romito returns, simplified as if in a fraction and authentic as an absolute man, before being an absolute chef.

The chef from L’Aquila tells his story in chapters, like a Tarantino film only the other way round, free from the blood of virtual polemics. While words are like labels for things, it is also true that the simple elegance with which Romito names his dishes – be it an Onion Assoluto (2009) or a Roasted artichoke (2013) or a Cold linguine, oyster and potato (2015) – isn’t completely truthful. Or better it doesn’t reveal all the truth, in that it says nothing about the techniques of high pressure, cold extraction, dialogue between (sugarless) sweet and savoury, following the footsteps of masters Corrado Assenza and Ferran Adrià. Up to the Bread (without basket) in search of lost wheat grains, such as saragolla abruzzese, another “absolute” word which at Reale becomes a dish.

It’s a research conducted so as to discover the territory, up to the mimesis, which follows a “sustainable approach to creativity”. This is the title of Matt Orlando’s lesson. American, he’s now based in Copenhagen and works in the kitchen at Amass (Denmark). A master chef who’s crazy about hip hop and personally creates the play list he puts every night in his restaurant (on the right forearm he’s got a tattoo with the logo of the Hieroglyphics, a cult band from California) he uses fish scraps, coffee grounds as raw materials and even recycles up to 80 litres of water every day, the wax at the bottom of the candles and the paper from the eggs (no worries, wax and paper are only used to light up the fire).

Thirty? No, fifty years old, something to make the old ladies go crazy, as it’s clear that yoga and raw food veganism have a positive effect on Californian chef Matthew Kenney (Matthew Kenney academy in Santa Monica), the portrait of health without wrinkles. Forget sad carrots and herbs seasoned with melancholy, here come Very tall – literally – lasagne with tomato and courgettes, full of colours, sauces, emulsions and textures, repeated all over the world. This shows you don’t need to put creativity, technique and flavour to fine tune a sustainable cooking “beyond any rhetoric”. The person pointing this out is the chef from Ratanà in Milan. Battisti paid lots of attention to respect, slapping those who, in the year of Expo, polished their appearance with the story of “feeding the planet”, a slogan used with lightness and pitiful results. Clean, ethical, beautiful, clean and just, are all words that today have no meaning left. Sustainability means not compromising the future of the generations to come”.

Starting from respect for tradition, as they teach at Guido’s, the historic establishment in Serralunga d’Alba (Cuneo) thanks to brothers Andrea, Piero and Ugo Alciati, “a family that left a very strong mark in the fate of Italian gastronomy”, said Oscar Farinetti, “one of the first two-Michelin stars in Italy”. At Guido they serve a vertiginous Vertical tasting of agnolotti: al tovagliolo, in broth, with roasted meat sauce and melted butter, which becomes very vertical by adding Barbera.

And in a way that’s only possible at Identità, we move from Cuneo to the Philippines with a change of scene. The final act in the auditorium is handed to Margarita Forés, Casa Artusi’s lady in Manila. The winner of Asia’s Best Female Chef 2016 according to the 50 Best San Pellegrino and Acqua Panna, a maternal cooking, intensely connected with local producers whom she gets involved in various agricultural projects. A totally sustainable agriculture, naturally.