Pietro Leemann

 Credits Brambilla-Serrani

 Credits Brambilla-Serrani

Joia

via Panfilo Castaldi, 18
Milano
T. +39.02.29522124
joia@joia.it

Pietro Leemann loves to sustain that great cooking is the mirror of the historical moment it’s part of. But this isn’t a definition that faithfully photographs his work, because this polite and very acute chef from Ticino, class of 1961, transplanted to Milan after learning the tricks of the trade from Fredy Girardet and Gualtiero Marchesi, and a fundamental two-year excursus in China and Japan, is somewhat avant-garde. A chef who has always swerved away from the time and space into which he has been thrown.

Let’s look back to the 1990’s: while everything around the Milanese “kasbah” in which Joia is located was starting to fill up with Ethiopian and Moroccan restaurants and pizzerias that serve up bricks disguised with mozzarella and tomato, he started designing apparent eggs, reproducing Orphic songs to creation in a sort of pantheism which knows no other god than nature. Nature which he has always tried to reproduce on the plate with an evolved mimesis, with gestures that strip the ingredient of its most impalpable and tasty essence, with simple cooking techniques, condiments that dissipate in your mouth, concepts of an abstraction which invites you, first and foremost, to smile.

An irony which, on a par with that of Socrates, catapults profound Oriental suggestions to Mediterranean longitudes, breaths of Japanese wisdom never experienced before. How can you be anything but serene when you look at that Renaissance Raviolo that reproduces the round forms of autumn? And what about the Green planet, a globe of land and water in the guide of a cabbage? And how good does it feel to walk Under the coloured blanket, placid woodland floor of morels, asparagus, spicy courgettes and mint pesto? All tributes to nature, tuned by a chef who is the most romantic of our time.

Has participated in

Identità di Libertà, Identità Milano, Shanghai


by

Gabriele Zanatta

born in Milan, 1973, freelance journalist, coordinator of Identità Golose World restaurant guidebook since 2007, he is a contributor for several magazines and teaches History of gastronomy and Culinary global trends into universities and institutes. 
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