Nino Di Costanzo

If you listen to him speak, he reminds you of a Serie A footballer: never a word out of place, never running the risk of naming names, always diplomatic when he's judging anyone. He's an anti-polemical who leaves all his endless vis on the “playground”, made of the dishes he designs himself, modelling corals, Limoges porcelain or small glass sculptures from Murano, based on the principle that assigns a content to each shape. This is, in fact, one of the very rare cases in Italy, of a chef who understands that the threshold between food and its container must be osmotic, not dividing.

He's a silent artist who, without a word, in little time has already received two Michelin stars (in 2008 and 2010). Meanwhile, the noisiness of tastes continues to envelop dishes raving in a dance of taste and of discipline, that of Gualtiero Marchesi and Gaetano Trovato, two of his teachers, together with Juan Marì Arzak, a Basque monument to the disciplined fantasy that's still present in some of Nino Di Costanzo's most colourful dishes. Today, however, the ingredients composing his dishes are totally local. In fact, on a closer look, they are made in Ischia, the island where Nino was born and where he returned after his training odyssey. There's a palpable domestic confidence within which he “paints” dishes for 20, maximum 22 lucky people, with his brush dipped in oil. The extra virgin olive oil, that is, an immense passion such as that for each and every one of the 24 types of pasta and potatoes combined in his architectonic Pasta e patate, after driving crazy 7 pasta factories in Gragnano and 5 producers of different tubers. Like disco mirror balls over papillary parties, raving between the typically insular assemblage of sour, brackish, vegetal and sweet.

All this, surrounded by the surreal calm that envelops the entire kitchen team of Il Mosaico, coherent with the quiet chef: you can only hear a «yes, chef» between one pasta cooking timer and the other. The ticking of a mania towards which everyone is rowing, following the rhythm beaten by the quiet helmsman. A rhythm which was interrupted on March 2015 when our chef left Terme Manzi hotel. One year leater he would open Danì Maison.