Alfonso Caputo
crediti: Brambilla - Serrani
Sun rises south of avant-garde: from Campania to Sicilia photosynthesis blossoms on plates, recipes distilled by light that mature vegetables and warm sand along beaches. The same sand that populates Marina del Cantone, a few steps of seashore just beside the very wide veranda where Alfonso Caputo cooks.
His name comes from the chef’s grandfather, a town eminence and founder of the restaurant, that after him saw many women working until it came in the hand of this long-awarded chef. No alberghiero studies for him: he attended accountancy high school and, most of all, he cooked with his grandmother Jolanda and mum Grazia since is he’s 14. Soon it becomes a choice of life that pushes him to go on stage by Gualtiero Marchesi, up to France and Japan.
He even visits Ancel Keys in Pioppi’s buen retiro, to get to know the ‘mediterranean-ness’ they talk about… A too vague concept for his campanian pride: it had to be mitigated with a zoom on his lands, a perfect amount of irony and some joyful touches of fantasy.
The secrets of the Fisherman are many: his sense of duty, which leads Alfonso to cook from 7 to midnight, with a very short pause between 4 and 6 p.m. Then his synergy with his sister Mariella and his brother-in-law Claudio, the maître, while his mother Grazia still rules the kitchen rhythms.
But his most efficient partner is Marina di Cantone, that provides him with raw materials of supreme quality. From the ‘poor’ fishes fished for 40 years by Amerigo, Antonio, Pasquale and Giuseppe, up to neighboring Gragnano’s vegetables, coming from really rural farmers.
«Ours is not an avant-garde cuisine: we mainly try to have fun and avoid routine», Alfonso, «Every morning we wait for the product because product is the only part that changes recipes, making us blossom the idea of playing in a new way. Creativity doesn’t mean to ape Spanish or molecular chefs: I prefer to get mad to get the same result just by working on the natural product it».
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Identità Milano
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