Frank Rizzuti

The Italian restaurant scene had stopped at Eboli, before Francesco Rizzuti took it by the hand and made it feel at home, leaving the equation of a gastronomic cuisine from Basilicata under the silverware, joining the axis of terroir with the x-axis of contemporaneity, in an orthogonality worthy of Francis Bacon’s cages, from which his talent flipped its wings, with the airy flash of a wild bird.

Bashful, gentle, serious, he has the credit for an originality which is, at the same time, both innate and peculiar; his radical attitude oozes earth and rigorousness. He’s on the alert to foresee the traps on the belvedere of regional cuisine, full of chefs and recipes killed by an out-of-place paw. In other words, the misunderstanding of tradition of which Camporesi talked (“all that is served up as ‘typical’, ‘homemade’, is almost always kitsch food, second-hand culinary junk”), like the love for novelty with its dump of already dead creations, demolished together with collective memory. His intentions had nothing to do with this: this impossible missionary cultivates tradition in the way Gustav Mahler intended it, “safeguard of the fire, not veneration of the cinders”. As his fuel, he uses the wood of imagination, his bellows are the pneuma of culinary passion.

His biography is bare as the slopes of the Maiella massif: his parents, two retailers in Potenza, a normal interest for food, the decision, with his friend Franco Scuteri, to open a pub when he was a kid. And from there on, the outburst. After changing a couple of cooks, the apron stays tied around Frank, for ever. In his mind, the already clear vision of an accurate cuisine from Basilicata, brought into focus after going around restaurants; on his bedside table, one book followed the other in order to learn the techniques and concepts of local “surgery”.

Since 2004, the anthropological afflatus that he conducted in Potenza, recuperating ancient recipes – like water and salt – and thanks to the fieldwork with artisans, was doubled in the Calabrian maison of Dattilo: this was the occasion for a Southern syncretism that ripped up, with blue, the stony calm of Potenza.

Frank Rizzuti passed away February the 17th 2014.