«I realised almost from the start that the road taken, that of changing pizza, was the right one. I then got truly scared I wouldn’t be up to the job. I told myself: "Simone, you need to keep your feet on the ground».
In this sentence there’s the lightness of a dreamer and the soundness of a farmer; the creative work of the mind and the manual one. It is not easy for these elements to live in the same person: one of these rare people was born in Verona in 1971 and has been making pizzas since 1988, and has a place of his own - I Tigli in San Bonifacio - since 1994. He changed the way of conceiving pizza in the land of pizza itself. He made it noble, made sure that the reputation of a “creative” pizza chef would rise to the same level of a chef.
The ninth of nine children, a humble family. Some of his brothers took over a small village pizzeria, «that’s where it all began». As children, in primary school, some wanted to become an astronaut, others a football player. He wanted to make pizza. His adventure also went through hard times, of course. It was 1999, he says: «Until then I had kept a rather classic approach at
I Tigli. Things started to turn out badly from a personal point of view and this was having consequences professionally too. I thought of making a big change: "Open a bar? A wine bar?". Then I decided: instead of changing job I would change
my job».
The tension was high in the pizza sector. A fast food logic was dominating: products were increasingly mass-produced, everyone was rushing to cut costs and quality. «I said: let’s do the opposite, let’s improve the dough, use fresh raw materials». An initially cautious turning point.
The boom arrived a few years later, in 2005: «A television crew came for a report, I thought it was for a local television. Two weeks later, the phone suddenly began to ring, and continued the next day, and never stopped. In a few hours I was booked for the following three months. The television crew was from
Matrix, an important news programme on Canale 5».
This year the twentieth birthday of I Tigli is celebrated. The anniversary will be celebrated worthily, throughout 2015, with important events from March until December.
We almost forgot: the person we’re talking about is Simone Padoan. Enjoy the photo gallery (photos are by Aromicreativi).
