These are difficult times for catering, but don’t think the Star Man is doing better. Unfortunately the great Italian catering is sculpted in an impalpable material that goes beyond the plate, the experience concerns first of all the service, the attention to the customer, the tension towards a more or less pushed hospitality, is made of colors, sounds, music, which cannot be played at home. Even the dishes must be rethought in the delivery menu, both in the application and in the choice: I can also recreate them in my kitchen, but I don’t think I can even remotely emulate a starred chef.
I’m used to being on the other side of the table, the one where you sit and savor. So imagine my scorn when I was told that the restaurant closed for dinner. And that many of the restaurants I had planned to visit, here in Italy but also abroad, were closed even at lunch or, even worse, have closed their doors. But I must say that I have changed my mind: even the stars have adapted to this sudden change and I do not mind the idea of tasting every evening a kitchen (starry) to my home table. As you can imagine, I have accumulated over the years all the cutlery and tools of the trade, to the envy of a high- level restaurant. I’m bad at service, but I’m promoting myself.
I am so demanding even with myself in mise en place, that I will look with sympathy at the next maitre d’ careless when I return for restaurants. I pride myself to have tried, since they closed the fires in the evening, all the starred restaurants that do delivery (and cover all of Italy): here are my favorite dinners.
I rushed to order the sandwich with cod and the one with gricia and chicory by Adriano Baldassarre bewitched me: his trattoria L’Avvolgibile looks like a Capitoline restaurant of the ’70s, but the food excited me. Maybe I won’t be able to go back to the Duomo restaurant in Ragusa Ibla at least until the end of the month, when Ciccio Sultano should reopen its doors, but in the meantime I console myself with his shop full of delicacies: evo oil from the Iblei Mountains, Ragusa cheese and other pantry products. And then I also started to cook, with the kit to make the famous pasta Turiddu or that of pasta and buzzonaglia of Tuna Head.
The delivery of Carlo Cracco is going great, and I understand it: from veal with tuna sauce to rice to jumping and vegetable ragout, the Vicenza chef also has a large online shop where you can buy the best products he uses in the kitchen, including a new bitter
specially designed by him. I find it unforgettable: it is the delivery of Massimiliano Mascia del San Domenico di Imola, which this year celebrates 50 years of activity. I particularly love its must, the Uovo in Raviolo. And at lunch and weekend I tried the Menu of 50 years, a real journey through the dishes that have made the history of the restaurant, from the chef Nino Bergese, Valentino Marcattilii up to Massimiliano Mascia. I feel like I’m in Polesine when I try, strictly in my walls, the famous culatello of Zibello, the salami “Spigarolino” and the typical Parmesan cups of chef Massimo Spigaroli and his brother Luciano de l’Antica Corte Pallavicina. We are always in Emilia Romagna with the delights in designer jars, gourmet panettone and leavened author that produces in Modena Luca Marchini, president of the JRE of Italy in his l’Erba del Re. I could not resist the charm of the godurious Funnel Box, the 5-course menu of the ecclettico chef Cristiano Tomei of Lucca, you can choose between meat, fish, vegetarian, vegan or omnivorous.
8pus is the new dark kitchen and the project entirely dedicated to the delivery of chef Giuseppe Iannotti from Kresios, with delivery throughout Italy both box with thematic menus and to be cooked at the time, all dedicated to seafood dishes. There are many creative recipes that blend sushi with the most authentic Sicilian cuisine: it is proposed by Tony Lo Coco de I Pupi di Bagheria, in the province of Palermo. In his career he cooked for personalities such as Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, Prince Harry, Charlize Theron, Rania of Jordan, the Danish royalty and Sean Penn. Up to the Man of the Stars, then.
