What’s good in Liguria

After last week’s discussion on the difficult state of the restaurant industry in the border region of Liguria, in Maresa Bisozzi’s article Motionless Liguria, we publish this new piece. Today, two first ladies of Genoa’s restaurant scene intervene: Barbara Pisano of the Baldin and Elisa Arduini of the The Cook restaurants.

Indeed it is true: in Liguria the economic crisis is present and you can feel it more than elsewhere, but we believe that while there are people everywhere who are motionless, there are also those who stand up and make long steps down a path that only looks forward.

As young restaurateurs in Liguria, we love our land and our sea. Everyday we search for ingredients that can highlight our dishes. The available raw materials are the result of often difficult cultivations due to the shape of these marvellous mountains rising steeply from the sea, but perhaps it’s because of this “effort” that excellent products are produced: taggiasche olives, Pigna beans, Albenga artichokes, our Pigato and Vermentino grapes, often gathered like the olives, on the terraces where harvesting can only made by hand-picking, without the use of machines. Let’s not speak of the sea, often with very deep sea floors which make fishing difficult.

At the same time, we strive to have some forward-looking and innovative ideas and often difficulties encourage to do one’s best. An important example for us and for the whole of Liguria is given by Bisson, a winery in Chiavari (Genoa) which has made a risky bet, to say the least: they have fermented a bianchetta (a local grape variety) in bottles at 40 metres underneath the sea in the Bay of Portofino. Against all odds, they have managed to obtain a wine which we now sell with great pride in our restaurants, being aware that we’re serving not a simple wine but the victory of an ambitious, almost unreal project, given the initial bureaucratic and managing difficulties.

The main ingredient of any success is passion for work. Many times, this is undermined by local administrations which are evermore difficult: today, in order to have a high quality restaurant, you need to be an accountant, a labour consultant, an entrepreneur and often a “magician” too. Only the latter, in fact, is capable of planning an enterprise in a market that is more and more unpredictable. We often find ourselves looking for the answer to why on a particular day we only had one reservation, and on the following the restaurant was full.

A magic wand would be necessary, in order to buy raw materials and organise the staff. Every time we are discouraged by some difficulty, however, we take the challenge and it is from there that we start again, from the origin and the motivation that has led us to have a restaurant, namely Passion! And as Albert Einstein said "A crisis can be a real blessing to any person, to any nation. For all crises bring progress". In our case, the chef, who is often also the restaurant’s owner, encouraged to bring work and energy to his restaurant, is also distracted by side-jobs, which are perhaps linked to food, but new jobs nonetheless.

To survive, finally, one needs to reinvent oneself: open cooking schools, work as a teacher, a consultant, go on television. In other words, it is necessary to make choices and decisions that perhaps, if not forced by difficulties, one would not have made. Though due to a critical moment, all this is, in fact, an enrichment which will certainly lead to even richer and more rewarding results in a future context of prosperity. We finish by quoting Helen Keller: “Behind a successful project there’s someone who once took a brave decision”. Good luck to everyone.