18-12-2017
Franco Pepe in front of Authentica’s heart, the oven that can bake pizzas for a maximum of 10 guests in the private room opened informally on the 7th December
The preview took place on Thursday 7th December, with many details that still need fixing, such as a light in the middle and the leather chairs. There will be two more pilot-events on the 20th and 26th December, and as of January, it will be fully running. So we dined in «a place where you can go back to the roots, where you can listen to, meditate, create. Where you can teach, train, and research. An intimate, exclusive place, where flavours are enhanced, where you can go into depth, find peace, and make space for human relations».
All this «used to be a dream. Today it’s called Authentica, the new dining room at Pepe in Grani» in Caiazzo, Caserta, the town all the world now knows thanks to Franco Pepe. Pepe is a person who feeds on visions and doubts. When the latter cast a shadow on an idea, he abandons it. In the alley dedicated to San Giovanni Battista, a pizzeria that spreads across three floors, a garden and a terrace, the pizzaiolo from Caserta created a pizzeria within the pizzeria.
In order to create this, he removed the bathroom on the same floor, and made a hole in a bearing wall so as to unite a room in the adjacent building. A square room, with a wood oven in the left corner opposite the entrance where one can put one, perhaps two pizzas at a time. In front of it, there’s a tall, slightly curved table, the slice of a circumference. On the oven’s side, there’s the work top, on the other, the chairs. The pizzaiolo kneads with his back to the oven, then holds the shovel, turns around and slips the pizza inside. Eight, ten guests at most with whom Pepe can speak, show the different phases of his work, invite them to roll out the dough, season it and put it in the oven too. Or there can be themed dinners, and not cooking classes, presenting products, a preview of a recipe, books, people.
Franco was excited on Thursday. A man who has more doubts than certainties, he carefully replied to questions, alternating them with nine pizzas, eight savoury ones and the ninth as a sweet thanks to the apricots form Vesuvius. He also spoke of his father who «would wear a suit in the morning and walk by the newsagent’s to buy a copy of Roma. He then put it under his arm, and, two hundred metres later, he was already in the pizzeria.
For info on Authentica call +39.0823.862718. Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso
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born in Milan in March 1955, at Il Giornale for 31 years dividing himself between sports and food, since 2004 he's the creator and curator of Identità Golose. blog www.paolomarchi.it instagram instagram.com/oloapmarchi