Luciano Alberti

In this era of galloping dromocracy, Luciano Alberti’s cooking was not in a hurry. It reached the top with the patient and marked rhythm of the highlanders, however able to transmit the thrill of a safe downhill run. Concise and generous at times, always spontaneous in its eruptions of creativity under the reassuring cover of the territory. Born in 1962 in Trivero, in the mountains around Biella, from the very first years spent at the hotel restaurant Luciano he did all he could during summer holidays and vacation days.

At the beginning in the neighborhood and then increasingly far away, up to the perfidious Albion where he first went in 1982 to the London’s Café Royale. A false track featuring big eating places and zero passion, which led him to change his plans in favor of a one-way ticket back to Italy. He was lured by the sirens of Liguria: fish but most of all oil and olives. A taste philosophy marked by a Mediterranean mythos filled with aromatic herbs, perceived among the silver glimmer of the leafy fronds. Up to when, with his wife Stefania, he did the leap of anchovy reminding Orengo and moved from the coast to the inland ancestral mountains. And from a lean and perishable fish he distilled the power of taste without time. Magic of the Piedmontese transubstantiation.

In his Osteria del Borgo, opened in 2005 in Borgosesia, the certainties of the territory shine in the golden miaccia and the greasy bagna cauda; however the chain can expand in the cold store as well as in the store-room of imagination. Trout, paletta di Coggiola (pork shoulder flavored with spices), mountain Toma cheese and white truffles redden against a western sunset while the Abruzzi linguine embrace the legendary anchovy paste with savoy leaves and bread crumbs. That of Eugenio Pol which, besides filling the basket, escorts the dishes with ad hoc matchings and enliven them as an ingredient, crossing the border of the kitchen. «We are customers one of the other and this has created a dynamics of giving even as regards the know-how. I have learned from him the importance of acidity, a principle that drives me well beyond the versatile use of his bread».

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Alessandra Meldolesi

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