Mauro Colagreco
Credits Brambilla-Serrani
Is he Argentinean? Or is he Italian? Or is he French only as country of adoption? Few boys of his generation – very soon Mauro will be a magnificent forty-year-old too- may aspire to a double or even triple nationality. It isn’t only because the Italian border is so close to his restaurant that five or six years ago, the day after our first dinner at the Mirazur along the seaside promenade of Menton, near the bay of Nice and the enclave of Monaco, we called our friend Sbo, then director of a guide of Italian restaurants, and said: «Listen, if you don’t list him in the selection we don’t speak to you anymore».
If he has never received the three forks nor has he been welcomed in Rome with full honors, the world of the cuisine without frontiers –revenge is a dish best served in a bain-marie- now welcomes him with open arms. For the delicacy of his after Passard outstanding touch, which went well beyond the sensuality of cooking. Between allusion and concreteness of matter, Colagreco is a farmer poet, faithful to the garden of his imagination –someone offers himself a boat, he has recently offered himself a vegetable garden- where he finds herbs and scents very popular for dishes featuring a fish vegetable minimalism where cooking is inversely proportional to the combustion of reflection. To say it with different words, Mauro deserves the “Chef’s Choice” trophy. The first clients, the real lovers, are those who have always crossed his steps: from his friend Redzepi to Pascal Barbot and Claude Bosi up to Alex Atala and David Kinch of the Manresa in California.
There is some Raw in Colagreco: a way of cooking which goes beyond the dichotomy of cooked/raw, the urgency of the frontality of raw material, a brutality where the vegetable contribution doubles the laboratory dimension of his cooking. All his dishes show a work in progress, develop with the passing of days and weeks. Maybe he doesn’t know it, but he is a Barthesian – more than the empire of signs, his cuisine gathers fragments of a loving path, reassembling it in a sunny writing, a story telling among the most modern, versatile and unpredictable («I’m not there», as our friend Todd Haynes would say, the one who had the character of Bob Dylan interpreted by six different actors… in the same movie) really among the most peculiar in the present European panorama. Attention: euphemism.
In January 2019, the apotheosis: 3 Michelin stars, the first in history for an Argentine chef.
Has participated in
Identità Milano