Identità Future, 20 years of new ideas in the kitchen

It isn’t true that every edition of Identità Milano reflects its year of reference and its themes. It does so, in many cases, but not always. Sometimes it embraces a much wider time span. For sure, in January 2005, the year of the debut, it was essential for Claudio Ceroni and me to make a brilliant debut, to do things skilfully and carefully so that everyone could say “Good first take! Keep going.”

And this is what happened. We grew up looking ahead, theme after theme. We’ve now reached the Identità Future edition of 2025, emblem dish after emblem dish and famous quote after famous quote, choosing ideas, one edition after the other, that could fix that specific moment in a little image that we gave to each speaker and that now decorates hundreds of restaurants, and more, all around the planet.

And so here we are, reaching edition number 20 twelve months late, due to the pandemic. It’s an important milestone because the world today is completely different from that of our debut. Just think of the absence of social media. I’ll just quote a date: Facebook started in the United States on the 4^th of February 2004, basically sharing the same birthday as Identità Golose, with the Italian version arriving four years later, on the 14^th of May 2008. With all due distinctions and proportions, two little eggs, two embryos of realities that would soon give rise to increasingly important certainties.

Keeping to our field, we have reached the 20^th edition because we have all been able to grasp realities and changes, modify trajectories according to new moments, look ahead and not fossilise. We never have thought that people and their action cannot change. On the very first day of the congress, the 24^th of January 2005, Ferran Adrià reminded us that a congress does not celebrate, it anticipates. Perhaps it mistakes predictions, but it never looks back. We already have museums to cover history.

The risk is within any programme, designed from season to season. They are predictions and, as such, they are destined to be confirmed or denied by reality. And now that we are approaching the 20^th edition, the risk was to celebrate ourselves, forgetting that at the end of the day, it is all about numbers and that we must go further, we must insist on looking at the substance. The next theme enhances precisely the nature of this kind of event. With Identità Future, 20 years of new ideas in the kitchen, we reaffirm our belief in novelty, the knowledge that our humus began to settle in the mid-1990s and is now the fertiliser for future events. The past comforts and spurs us on to persevere and we will ask the speakers to tell us what their future will be. Ideas, lots of new ideas.

Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso