Identità New York 2013

The Expo of flavours, this will be the leitmotif of the fourth edition of Identità New York, which will take place from Friday 4th to Sunday 6th October at Eataly NY, continuing along the road taken in the autumn of 2011 when, after the totally Italian 2010 debut, designed with the objective of demonstrating that there’s more to Italy than “pasta, pizza and mandolins”, six Italian chefs began a discussion and cooking confrontation with six chefs based in New York - not necessarily from the United States, as far as birth and origins may go.

This event will be called the Expo of flavours because Milan will host the 2015 World’s Fair, focused on the theme of “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” and we at Identità cannot avoid listening to the voice that will raise in two years’ time, when the whole world will meet in the Lombard metropolis and fight against hunger in the world, but will also try to understand how to avoid diseases thanks to the right diet or making sure that food is always tasty too. All this while a continuous debate, a continuous exchange of ideas, products, techniques takes place.

After all, thinking of our meeting in New York, we’ve always looked for some commong ground between the representatives of different gastronomic cultures. Even though every community is nourished by its traditions, it is also true that every typical expression can be made personal by those who, despite having different roots, admire this expression to the extent they feel it as their own. It is rare, especially in big cities, to find chefs who were born there. Men and women move because of love, in order to find a better job, an environment they prefer and so there’s a continuous mixing of different traditions and sensitivities, so that the mind is nourished by a mix of memories and ideas that lead to new dishes starting from ingredients and recipes that are often very well known.

A chef that doesn’t confront himself, a chef that refuses the contamination with different cultures is a more limited chef: the sources from which he can draw upon are poorer and who knows if one of his dishes could have been tastier had he had a certain product at hand…

Identità New York 2013 will see Italian and American chefs side by side, using six essential ingredients, those foods full of taste that are to be found in all gastronomic cultures, those raw materials that are a common ground for many and that have had different developments because every man, every people, has his story and what is good and logic for some, may be abstruse and bad for others.

The twelve chefs and pastry-chefs who in October will give life to the fourth edition of Identità New York, will measure themselves with Eggs, Tomatos, Salted Codfish, Cheese, Pasta and Rice. For instance, Italians are the only people in the world who love pasta and rice “al dente”, that touch of rawness that makes everyone go crazy, with a fundamental difference: we Italians are crazy when we feel a rice grain or spaghetti between our teeth, foreigners go mad because they find them raw. The ingredient, however, is the same. It is its use that makes it good or bad depending on who is tasting it.