The Woman Defining A Culinary Movement With The New Tastemakers Of Italy

 Laura Lazzaroni is a veteran journalist, food writer, and baker who has become an expert at seeking out tastemakers, from her years in New York for La Repubblica’s D magazine, to her position as Features Director of L’Uomo Vogue to co-directing the launch of the Italian edition of Food & Wine magazine, Lazzaroni has had years to fine-tune her palette in all things exquisitely Italian.

 Now Lazzaroni has written her third book, The New Cucina Italiana, a journey for the senses through the kitchens, restaurants, and farms of chefs across Italy who are reshaping the Italian culinary landscape as we have known it. Their approach to the nonna tradition is respectful, but they are breathing new life into it by applying new cooking techniques, focusing on more sustainable approaches, and expanding the range of restaurant formats, rethinking the trattoria, introducing mixology programs – and more.

 Despite unexpected delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic that ravaged Italy and in particular, the restaurant industry, Lazzaroni feels like the timing is right, “honestly, I prefer that the book comes out with Biden as president, I like the idea that it will go to an America that has turned the page.”

 She explains to me the cultural environment necessary to digest a quiet food revolution like the one happening in Italy today. “This tolerance, this open-mindedness and ability to lend a curious ear to a fresh conversation is what I’m talking about when I say an America that is open to something new, even if it touches something as sacred as the idea of traditional Italian cuisine. This is also a message of hope: many of these young chefs did their internships abroad and chose to come back here to put their experience to good use, or they are taking over family restaurants. They want to elevate and highlight the best of their territories and they work with local producers who are often very young, and together they reignite local micro-economies. It’s a very brave thing to do.”

 Italian cuisine is one of the most beloved in the world, but outside the borders of Italy (and sometimes even inside) there is a binary idea of it as a whole: Lazzaroni believes that it is seen as either hyper conceptualized gourmet or a cuisine that is solely mom’s and pop’s trattorie, “which is delicious – but there is now a whole range in between these extreme opposites of the spectrum. This is something that is largely in the hands of young chefs, women, and men: their approach is still flavor-centric, but it’s emancipated” says Lazzaroni.

 These chefs are revising the old tropes and also the trippa. In fact, trippa – or in English, tripe, is not typically a coveted piece of meat, it’s one of those forgotten cuts of meat that have had a bit of a renaissance of late. It’s inexpensive and, as with all of the nose-to-tail approach, it offers a sustainable solution. It was at the Milanese restaurant Trippa, owned by Chef Diego Rossi, waiting tables with other journalists during a multi-chef dinner, that she realized a movement was brewing. Many of the chefs cooking that night ended up in the book.

 An emblematic example of the movement is chef Niko Romito, who Lazzaroni believes “represents the future of our cuisine, an ‘absolute’ chef who combines superior gastronomic sensibility, astute entrepreneurial vision and an uncanny ability to transfer his knowledge to the public and young chefs hungry for inspiration.”

 Romito is a rare example of a chef who was able to harness and codify his cuisine: he did it in his manifesto, 10 Lezioni di Cucina, which he co-wrote with Lazzaroni in 2014. “Standardizing allows him to dream big: he can grow, knowing his legacy is protected even if he can’t be hands-on for everything.” Today, Romito has projects that sweep the range of food from luxury to casual. His model gives a tangible sense that there is a democratization of elevated food being made accessible to everyone, impeccable service included in all of his projects from the luxurious three Michelin experience at Reale to his interpretation of a casual restaurant, Spazio, and ALT, which is his idea of Italian roadside diner.

 “If fine dining restaurants are the Ferraris of food, elite places where big bucks can be spent on research, ingredients, and carefully engineered protocols, the trattoria is where we re-educate the masses…We need it all, the high and the low: they’re stronger when they work together.” writes Lazzaroni.

 And the movement also needs “outsiders with an inside track” here Lazzaroni writes about Chef Alice Delcourt of Milan’s Erba Brusca, originally from North Carolina but “it was Italian food that inspired me to cook. It’s the most exciting for me…I don’t have all the ingrained tradition and I’m not shackled.” Lazzaroni makes it a point to explain that Alice Delcourt does not revisit recipes, but does draw flavors and cooking methods from the Mediterranean basin, like Sicily and North Africa, as well as from her experience at legendary River Cafe, in London.

 The movement also celebrates a return to foraging – once a common practice, lost and then found again – bringing to the table wild herbs, roots, vegetables, and fruits exploding with flavor and nutrients. The concept supports sustainable practices but also adds an undeniable sense of adventure to the picture. Lazzaroni talks about Alessandro Miocchi and Giuseppe Lo Iudice, chefs and owners of Retrobottega in Rome’s historical center. Once a week Miocchi goes to the outskirts of Lazio or on the Massiffs of Abruzzo to pick flavors of the wild, “we pick what is there, nothing is predetermined, there is little we can control we see what we get,” writes Lazzaroni. Foraged vegetables are central to Retrobottega’s menu, as are at Mezza Pagnotta, a Pugliese restaurant owned by the Montaruli brothers, who forage on the Murge plateau. Their foraging guide is an old mustachioed gentleman who rides a Gilera bike strapped with bundles of leaves and flowers.

 Lazzaroni highlights how many of these chefs of the New Cucina Italiana honor vegetables and even fruits and seeds in their main courses. Antonia Klugmann, owner and chef of 1 Michelin star restaurant, L’Argine a Vencò, is doing just that. Located in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, at the border with Slovenia, the restaurant is surrounded by a hectare of land, “vegetables are a serious matter here, they provide most of the alphabet and punctuation of Antonia’s dishes – while the vocabulary comes from the unusual tradition of this borderland,” writes Lazzaroni. Antonia Klugmann has a love for using fruit in first courses and savory dishes – a typical combination in her region, something she honors but also reinterprets. One of her signature dishes is beet gnocchi with plum gelatin and rose, a recipe among others created by the featured chefs you can discover in Lazzaroni’s book.

 These and many more Italian chefs are shaping the culinary vocabulary of the country. Lazzaroni tells me that even despite the pandemic, “They have all shown incredible resilience, finding new outlets and creative solutions to keep working, and also comradery which is one of the traits I love most in this movement. It’s comforting to know it’s still there.”