Pier Bussetti

In the geography of Italian cuisine, Turin is not an ordinary place: it wounds you with a double-edged sword, tuned to the duplicity of a contemporary cuisine, unable to choose between tradition and the ‘shock of the new’. Nowhere else but here avant-garde cuisine was able to hand down the way it did into these pots, teeming with Futurist reminiscences, while encoded tables blend court’s grandeur with miserables’ inventiveness. Among this terroir, which unfolds time beyond space, Pier Bussetti is the most disturbing and most faithful interpreter, perfectly at ease into Castello Sabaudo in Govone’s glittering wrapping, side by side with her partner, cute sommelier Rosanna Basso.

He’s working through a pure research, by jumping over contradictions, junctions and oxymorons crowding contemporary gastronomy. With the help of long experiences in Asia, which provided him a negative to focus even more clearly a heretical and mocking Piedmontese identity. As we look to his recipes, collected in a forthcoming book, we notice a celebration of purees, clarified consommé with egg whites and jus just like Escoffier taught (Pier is still a food professor at a hotel management school), blocks that are ready to switch on the contrast with avant-garde. The hard menu is paradigmatic: it combines classic Piedmontese dishes with impertinent interpretations up to anarchy: an ironic exercise played on the figure of parody, metacuisine and enigmatography. It opens the prototypes’ machine to see how they are made, in order to dismantle them piece by piece, reversed. And he invented techniques indeed, a unique event in Italy: from spoon shock’s use of capsules up to the obulato long before Ferran Adrià.

The last pastiche was with music: Pier has been Anatrofobia band’s bass player for years, an experience that deeply influenced his dishes. «Since my style is more rhythmic than melodic, it strives to undermine the recognition of what is catchy». Recently it resounds on a more subtle level: 'warm' flavor nuances, Andoni’s style, as techniques and details among the imperceptible threshold.