Pino Cuttaia

Pino Cuttaia’s is a fantastic saga. A story riding an anomalous parabola, far away from the Euclidean schemes because it’s always ascending. An irresistible jump today awarded with two Michelin stars, shining on his native village’s restaurant, hidden by the noise of thousands souped-up motorbikes.

As a kid he left Licata with his family, off to Piedmont. Turin, the studies, a job in a factory and a sacred fire for cooking lighted only in the weekends, the only spare time remained. «Luckily, my passion became soon a job», he traces. But that doesn’t mean that his job went less hard: at Sorriso in Soriso or Patio in Pollone he went on working hard. At least, «I learned precision», an imprinting that, joined to Sicilian ingredients and an enviable talent, would lead soon his critics and consumers to worship him.

The millennium opened with the comeback of Cuttaia and his wife Loredana, destination Licata again. But now the chef is here to stay at Madia, in corso Re Capriata. There’s no better place for the chef to explore and redefine his childhood memoirs. Infact, it’s no secret that he likes to practice the most glutton psychoanalytic exercise possible: to update his past episodes. Just like with the pine-smoked and pizzaiola cod: it’s a recollection of when, as a kid, he used to go picking up pines from the fields, to feed his fireplace. And the pizzaiola? It reminds him of the days when his mother used to exhume the doggy bag in a shrewd and caring way.

The arancino in the oven, along with the fried mullet tea, instead, «talks about the ancient effort to preserve products through the changes of season, taken to the extreme move of obtaining a tea by drying the mullet fishbone». To remind in order to live experiences again, then. To remind to color already-lived things with a new paint. Devices as strong and shaky as an earthquake with the epicenter located in Licata. A bang whose rumble is well and indistinctly noticed by palates all around Italy.