I ate them Piedmontese agnolotti in Paris and I felt transported to the kitchen of my home in Turin. I recognized the taste of Sunday, like when my grandmother Michelina prepared agnolotti for family lunch. Proust’s Madeleine effect 100% guaranteed at the restaurant The Tastinggastronomic outlet ofhotel Castille 5 * in the chic heart of the French capital and part of Starhotels Collectionthanks to the management of chef Ugo Alciati.
At chef Alciati’s table
1 Michelin star chef at the helm of the historian GuidoRistorante from Serralunga d’Alba in Piedmont, heir to a family that wrote the history of Italian cuisine, and ambassador of Piedmontese cuisine in the world also thanks to the collaboration with the friend Oscar Farinetti of Eataly, Ugo Alciati is a true champion. He has no pierre or press office to communicate the splendid work he carries out together with his family, you can often find him in his kitchen from the early hours of the morning and he is the last to leave, he has no problem jumping into the car and driving for hundreds of kilometers to go and collect the best ingredient. As a good Piedmontese – and I’ll spare you the rhyming cliché here – chef Alciati doesn’t like self-promotion, in the sense that he will never let words precede his work. Instead, he lets his dishes speak for him – and since June 2017 they have also done so in French.
Good cuisine is an international language which first allows us to dialogue and Elisabetta Fabri, President and CEO of Starhotels, understood this immediately. When he asked the gentleman chef to collaborate for one of his hotels he wanted to bring high-level Italian style abroadAlciati had no doubts: Paris. «France is very close to Piedmontese cuisine, starting from the raw materials and small producers, everything is simpler. We bring many ingredients from Italy, but we get everything fresh from the French markets, where we find excellent quality products”, says chef Alciati. At the L’Assaggio restaurant, the menu starts out based on a more classic Italian and Mediterranean cuisine, then over time it becomes clear that the customer, who chooses to come here for a gourmet evening, is looking for Piedmont. Dishes like the Veal with tuna sauceL’Russian saladthe Agnolotti del Plinthe Guinea fowl and so on, they take space on paper and the proposal becomes Piedmont-centric – Parisian (and non-Parisian) customers say thank you.
A taste of Paris
Chef Alciati chooses to play the away match with the Torino shirt and uses the experience to his advantage by going to offer the best of the best of Piedmontese cuisine, the one that is in his blood, the one he has been able to do since he was a child curiously peering at his mother Lidia’s quick hands in the kitchen of the family restaurant with over 60 years of history. In the same rue Cambon where the myth of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was born, the L’Assaggio restaurant of the Italian boutique hotel Castille Paris maintains its success precisely because it is as fashionable as it is not at all. A concept that chef Alciati expresses very well: «Good people no lie (don’t move in Piedmontese, ed), we don’t move from our beliefs, but we are there. We realized over time that our beliefs are the new direction of catering. And by convictions I mean the careful choice of small producers and small farmers towards sustainable cuisine, the simplification of dishes towards a more understandable menu, in short what we have already been doing for 63 years. As I tell my brother, if we stand still, we are in fashion, you will see. Bubbles, air, spheres, molecules, they get boring in the long run. People want to eat well and taste good things, wants to live a memorable experience that passes through the palate of good taste. It is not enough to make elaborate and spectacular dishes, the beautiful will never be remembered as well as the good. True success lies inhave a good raw material like no otherhere’s what the first ingredient of great cuisine is: the search for excellent raw materials.
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