Eataly, a festival in full blast

When you will read this piece, all of us at Identità will already be at Eataly to enjoy, today, on Saturday May 18th, the second day of the first edition of the Roma wine&food festival. We left the megastore, built over 20 years ago on the other side of the railway tracks in Stazione Ostiense, when it was already past midnight. We left a beautiful feeling and all the happiness behind, together with those who didn’t want to leave the last floor of Eataly because when you’re having a good time, who cares about sleeping early. One finds an unexpected source of energy within himself that helps him to insist and fully enjoy the 25 euros spent for the ticket and a glass that helps you taste, understand and enjoy the 250 available wines, while everyone discusses which one is best, and eats some local bread with some Grana Padano, 16 or 24 months of seasoning, which is always a pleasant snack between a wine and a chat.

And while in the long journey that led us to this debut we paid maximum attention to the 15 chefs that will alternate each other in the three stations, they won’t be the only one participating. When you take the lift to the third floor, you find the long table where Luca Montersino and Gianluca Esposito have placed an extraordinary range of cakes. They are Eataly’s two protagonists, Luca for the sweet side, and Gianluca for the savoury one, though he will also be a pastry-chef during this long weekend. Esposito signs the classics, Luca the contemporary choices that wink at the future.

Two more steps and there are Massimo Pezzani’s cured meats from Parma. They have a personal character, with continuous variations of sweetness and short ageing, with the meat still rich in juices. His philosophy goes in the opposite direction to that of those who care for extreme refining (I admit I include myself in that group, even though Pezzani’s products have touched me, thanks to their frankness and elegant sensuality).

Then there’s the main dish, that is to say the three main dishes because for every lunch and dinner, five altogether, we find three chefs at a time, in the stations next to the tasting room. They’ve been chosen to express as many dishes selected from a list of five classics: salted codfish, pasta carbonara, couscous, veal in tuna sauce and chicken. All this while having in mind that, once the preparation is chosen, one will prepare it in the classic version, the other in a contemporary way, and the third focusing on the future.

So last night was the turn of Ugo Alciati who, having closed in Pollenzo, next to Bra, is preparing the new restaurant inside the Fontanafredda winery in Serralunga d’Alba. His Veal in tuna sauce dates back to sixty years ago, when his grandmother perfected the recipe, which was then passed on to the daughter, Lidia, at the time far from being traditional. “She wanted to find a way to valorise this meat which until then was dried and stressed in order to obtain the meat stock”. This is another demonstration of how every tradition starts from a human ingenious idea.

And then there was Arcangelo Dandini’s Pollo alla romana, the apostle of popular roman tradition “which had no place in the restaurant because its kingdom was in the houses, and it is in my grandmother’s house that I learnt to prepare this chicken with prosciutto”, and a sauce which you could endlessly mop up from your plate with some bread, seeing it’s so delicious.

Finally, there’s a happy Moreno Cedroni, happy since on Saturday June 1st he will reopen his Clandestino on Portonovo’s beach, in Ancona, happy with the many characteristics of his Salted codfish with roses, cardamom and fennel (the latter served raw, to give some crispiness). The salted codfish, a smelly fish by definition, since its preserved in salt, is cooked in oil with the little necessary heat to extract the collagen and prepare an unusual mayonnaise with it, ready to be served together with a Jerusalem artichoke sauce, and then with mustard seeds and so on, in a continuous play.

Today, at lunch time, it will be the turn of Marianna Vitale of Sud in Quarto (Naples), Heinz Beck of La Pergola in Roma and Emanuele Scarello of Gli Amici in Godia (Udine). From them, respectively, we’ll have some declinations of salted codfish, veal in tuna sauce and chicken. Tonight, instead, we’ll have Francesco Apreda of the Imago at the Hotel Hassler in Rome, Marco Stabile of L’Ora d’Aria in Florence and Davide Scabin of Combal.zero in Rivoli (Torino). In their dishes we’ll find couscous, veal in tuna sauce and pasta carbonara. Some excellent dishes, but as for the pasta carbonara, since it is prepared by Scabin, don’t expect any bucatini...