Monosilio-Shuman: strong flavours

The last day at Identità New York starts with Luciano Monosilio, the «rising star» of Pipero al Rex in Rome. The name of the dish says it all: Tripe and mussels, a preparation he has in the menu of his restaurant in Termini since a little over a month ago. «Some people don’t like offal, some don’t like mussels. I try to make both agree».

Tripe is Roman style: it is cleaned and then cooked with extra virgin olive oil, celery, carrots, onions and tomato sauce. Chilli pepper and sweet paprika. The beef stock is prepared in advance, until it reaches half its volume. The cooking liquid, once cold, is then cooked in a vacuum pack and cooled down. Meanwhile, some celery leaves are placed in the oven and powdered. In the dish a pleasant iced meringue of cherry tomatoes with albumin will be added.

The mussels, instead, are grilled with thyme and garlic. The dishing out implies first the tripe sauce on the base of the dish, then the mussel squares and the grilled tripe and the iced meringue with the powdered celery which gives a blessed freshness to the palate.

With Bryce Shuman instead, a neo-starred chef from North Carolina enters the picture, at the helm of Betony after having finished an important series of experiences, including an important role as executive sous chef at Eleven Madison Park, next door. The idea of the dish presented is based on a series of complex preparations and techniques, which finally find harmony together.

There’s ’nduja, to begin with, which he prepared himself as if he were hiding some origins from Calabria, with the fat and the shoulder of a pig processed with a meat grinder right in the classroom. This is a double surprise because it is not what you would usually expect from an American chef and because, usually, a chef would by it, he wouldn’t waste time and prepare it himself but would count on a butcher or meat curer.

The dish, however, is not finished: Bryce adds to his ‘nduja, naturally fermented carrots (for two weeks at 18°C), some red onion pickles, a ciabatta bread and some toasted bread with garlic and thyme. At the end, the chef mentions his passion for spices and aromatic herbs, a mania he inherited from his father, the jealous custodian of huge encyclopaedias on this topic.