Pietro Zito

Inspiration, exhalation: some restaurants can even breathe. Just like kabbalah explained, there’s a rhythm that goes in and out in harmony with the outside world. We are on the higher side of the Murgia area, in the town of Montegrosso di Andria: it’s an half-abandoned village at the food of Castel Del Monte, where sheeps migration tratturi (“tractors” in dialect) skirt olive presses, manor farms and pastures dipped into the mediterranean maquis.
Here nature pervades cooking and she is herself disciplined by it. It’s a cycle pushed deep in his details by solar panels and stove heat, overworked to heaten the restaurant water.

Osteria Antichi Sapori (“Ancient tastes’ Inn”), because here cuisine is timeless, apart from the seasons. Revisiting recipes? Not at all. It’s much better to work according to the passionate archeology of peasant folklore, “the priesthood of rustic rites” as Paolo Marchi properly defines it.
Pietro Zito says he learned from his grannies and parents but he is mainly a scholar from the maestro territory. It’s he who selects cheeses from manor farms and picks up spontaneous herbs from ditches. On his tables we find the best burrate and caciocavalli cheeses; char, ash or lime-grilled olives and the flared wheats of orecchiette, very perfumed when just derived from spikes after the harvest, burned by fire and toasted by heat. And the vegetables of papà Francesco, useless to say: at the age of 75, he passed from grilled meat to the kitchen gardens just near: every morning he himself cuts the vegetables and the herbs of the day.

That’s because his son Pietro handles every vegetable like the noblest fish. With a knife in his hand, he’s a watchmaker of an express cuisine, very well shown by the project Orto mio, where the customer picks up vegetables just like if they were lobsters from an aquarium. A sort of didactic factory that projects herself on the open kitchen and then on plates. After tasting his salad one thinks: why should I chase Sumatra or Hawaiian pepper when you can pick it up just by your house?