Gino Pesce and Patrizia Ronca

If every man is an island, let’s not speak of chefs. Perhaps you also have a restaurant that is a stage to a little-big theatre – in this case the island of Ponza – and you have to act; and you can only decide what kind of theatre to do as days go by. For years now Gino Pesce and Patrizia Ronca have been choosing a naturalistic acting. They’ve based their relationship with the public on intellectual honesty, without theatrical tricks which they could easily afford since their Acqua Pazza is the most famous place in this fascinating portion of Campania Felix in the waters of Southern Lazio, far away from everything yet crowded by hungry tourists for three months every year. In other words, they could easily offer a few hundred mediocre calories to scrape out a living.

Gino and Patrizia however know the meaning of self-respect and every day sing in its honour, using the score they know, the one well kept in the drawers of an island separated from the currents of contemporary trends and culinary hashtags. Everything thus starts from the raw materials, which Gino chooses with religious care and ancient wisdom, so that he then has just to make the big effort of working with them with a discrete hand. What we always like of Pesce is that he knows how to transform his cooking into the laboratory of a perfumer, one of which a siren then surfacing from the sea can add just a few drops just to seduce. Year after year, the work of Gino, born in 1965, has been more and more focused on starters, both raw and cooked, with a good percentage of experiments – nothing to do with Cern, however – while with first and main courses he’s more traditional, without ever slipping into the vernacular. In doing so, he always uses simple and correct rules, with well-built and structured forms. Patrizia, born in 1969, takes care of the cakes accomplishing the small miracle of making them convincing even without sound connections with regional pastry making tradition.