Dear Niko, I am writing to you so I get a little distracted. And since you are very far away, the stronger I will write to you . The incipit with Lucio Dalla's song came to me like this, but it is certain that Niko Romito you live far away as it is certain that we hope so much in the year to come. And yes, Niko lives in Abruzzo, a magical region and one of the least populated in Italy. For a Milanese a mirage, for a Roman a mountain destination given the distance from the weekend, for everyone a place of rare beauty and discovery. And Niko Romito lives in Castel di Sangro, a few kilometers from the most famous Rivisondoli where once his father Antonio, an eclectic and creative character, had a hotel. And in this Abruzzo "strong and gentle", as Primo Levi defined it, who coined the expression to define the title of one of his travel stories published in 1882, in this land I was saying, Niko is always there, except when he is not around for the world and for its tours (in "normal" times of course) since it has an important collaboration with Bulgari Hotels with the concept The restaurant.
Beijing, Shanghai, but also Milan, Dubai and soon Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, a success. And then you find yourself in Casadonna lost in those bewilders that have the flavor of adventure, in a sort of moorland that would have inspired Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters to write novels closer to the Mediterranean and certainly to the Adriatic. And he comes. Smiling, unsavory, courageous. It does nothing to please you but you like it, it does nothing to seduce you with its cuisine but it seduces you and has the true courage of men who live in remote lands. A story, his, fantastic. An outsider who finds himself with determination and stubbornness and takes first a star and then a second star within three years (2007 and 2009) until the Olympus of the gods, the third, proclaimed in 2013.
«When I inherited my father's pastry shop in Rivisondoli, I didn't really know how to cook. I was studying Economics and Business. I found myself offering classic traditional dishes such as cream and mushroom tagliatelle, sausage in scamorza cheese, and I was always full. We had the millefeuille and the apple pie. At the end of the first season, with my sister Christian who was in the room, we had set aside a treasure. Then at some point I decided to cook only what I wanted and the restaurant emptied. People sat at the table and asked us for the arrosticino, pecorino with honey and since it wasn't on the menu, they got up and left. In a week we made two covers. We were young, a little crazy, we managed to stay afloat with little. We had the ceramics of Limoges and Bernadotte that they gave only to starred chefs and I bought them through a colleague who then sent them back to me, the linen napkins with stitching, I served magnum by Gassier rosé as an aperitif, I was an extraterrestrial. But then the stars came, two in three years and everything changed. Many told me to move, I was the only Michelin in Abruzzo. At that time, I also said no to Bulgari to take the reins of the kitchen in Tokyo where Luca Fantin then went, but I said no because I had in mind Casadonna. Strange then how he came back anyway .
When you open a restaurant in a town of 689 inhabitants (Istat 2017 figure), if you don't fit in perfectly with the clientele's palate, you don't have many chances of duration. And instead Niko pulls straight and holds firm. Rather. He invests in the Casadonna project, where the Reale is located, his restaurant today three Michelin stars (which he moved from Rivisondoli to here in 2011), and nine rooms including suites and rooms in Majella stone, as well as several hectares of native pecorino vineyards and the professional school, theAcademy which bears his name. A former convent of the sixteenth century to symbolize an oasis of peace and purity like its cuisine. When he offers you a cauliflower, Niko, so to speak, is not telling you to taste a cauliflower cooked with a multitude of ingredients where the first is the main element, he is offering you the absolute essence of the vegetable studied and tested to give the pinnacle of the experience of its flavor.
"It is a domestic food dropped into haute cuisine, where it took two years of work to arrive at a dish among the most talked about by the critics and enthusiasts who come here, it is the three-star version of home-cooked cauliflower … nutritionally speaking, it makes its flavor perfect and pure. It takes haute cuisine that goes straight to the heart. I am fascinated when I make a dish … such as cardoncello with garlic, oil and parsley, the classic Italian tradition, or work with celery, carrots and onion. I took the three most used and least esteemed vegetables in our kitchen because they are hidden and usually serve as a base for meat sauce, braised and roasted. Why don't we restore dignity to three protagonists? Very Italian, right? Let's not call them broths but "absolute" because there is no added water. I get the idea by reading old manuals of regional cuisine. It is a result that has a structure similar to broth water but is the maximum concentration of flavor. And I still love soups, if I think about how many soup recipes there are, why not recreate the great soup in large restaurants? Haute cuisine must not lose its connection with the domestic kitchen, it can dialogue with modernity and maintain warmth, taste, affection ".
There is a lot emotion when Niko talks about cooking because it's not just cooking, it's culture, identity. "When I think of the cuisine of our country, the drawing of Italy on the map immediately comes to mind. The more I grow, the more I get to know other gastronomic realities, the more I appreciate the greatness of our food. It is a set of cultures and products, of the territory, of stories to tell, of biodiversity, of variety of products from the sea to the land, and above all it is a set of experiences that identify our culture and it is something extraordinary. I am fascinated by the cuisine of the bell towers, already only in Abruzzo four municipalities of the same province have different traditions and uses. For us it is obvious to always eat different dishes from the Aosta Valley to Sicily. Instead it is extraordinary. When I went to school, my references were the French and Spanish school, I didn't appreciate regional cuisine, it was an established fact. Instead today I perceive all its power. Our strength comes from the tavern – the type of dishes, the warmth, the service approach -, a world that fascinates foreigners. As a young man I thought it was a minor place, but instead I'm there culture and theidentity even stronger than those high-end catering kitchens that seek to pursue international standards. The idea that a restaurant cannot start from the trattoria model to obtain the star is very wrong. If I think of a historic three-star like Nadia Santini's Dal Pescatore, when you sit at her table, you eat traditional dishes brought to the nth degree with all the techniques she knows to make them magnificent. He makes an incredible effort to reset the recipes to improve the flavor, nutritional intake, lightness. In this way our food becomes absolutely identity and can dialogue with the world, become unique in the world .
Romito's thought is round, coherent, refined in unsuspecting times. And it is thanks to chefs like him that there could beUnesco in our future. "When I think about the candidacy, I imagine our territory that carries architecture and landscape with it, and food as a cultural expression of everything, a heritage that can be visited by the world and that tells the many values that peoples should seek for find quality and well-being for individuals and the planet . We are an evolving model, in short, and Niko Romito is an excellent representative of it.
