crediti: Brambilla - Serrani
via Banchina di Levante, 6 Senigallia (Ancona) T. +39.071.65463 info@uliassi.it
There are still many ways to learn to cook. Some have learnt from books, others in school, others from their mothers, or to pay their studies. This wasn’t the case for Mauro Uliassi who started to familiarise in his parents’ bar, around the gowns of the clients sitting on the high stools, and then continued with the hippies in the Seventies. This is to say that you can learn to cook also by living: of this he is the perfect demonstration, with his languid, well navigated sailor look, somewhere between a hippy and an existentialist, framed by those Pasolinian curls.
The setting of this story is the Marche’s coast, the «B side of Tuscany». Deeply in love, his father Franco, a lorry driver from a country family, and his mother Bianca Maria, daughter of restaurateurs, are busy in their bar, while their children Mauro and Catia rush between the tables. That is until the age of reason arrives, when the former pretends to be studying at the Itis institute and then changes to the Hotel management school, while the latter, a legendary beauty, studies computer sciences. The Hotel management school isn’t that bad, with loads of women and plenty of appetisers. Lightning, however, arrives later, with the strict cordon bleu course with Luca Capannari (eighteen hours of work that fly away) and most of all when he tries to seduce his wife Chantal with aphrodisiac delicacies. Old Freud perhaps was not mistaken when he spoke about libido, the strength that once sublimed can lead a chef towards art, like kundalini in transit between chakras.
In 1990, after lots of internships and experiences, Uliassi finally opens its doors. Mauro is in the kitchen, Catia in the dining room (in the photo with Filippo, Mauro’s son, who started from the ranks, both in the kitchen and, since 2011, in the dining room). In the beginning it’s a clean cuisine, already attracting queues of clients; it soon becomes a gourmand restaurant, in strict accordance with the rules. «Things were working, we could have bought an SUV with that money, or improve. We chose the challenge». Today that bet is worth three Michelin stars and other similar recognitions; a merit of the sound teamwork of all the staff, with a playful, hyper-technical, easy-going fish cuisine as the co-author, a rollercoaster made of engineering variations that turn the palate upside down.
by
Umbra di Perugia con residenza a Bologna, è giornalista e scrittrice di cucina. Tra i numeri volumi tradotti e curati, spicca "6, autoritratto della Cucina Italiana d’Avanguardia" per Cucina & Vini
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Mauro Uliassi