Waiting for the new season of 4 Restaurants, we will talk about pasta with the chef of the small screen: “stop thinking only about seasoning”
Chef Alessandro Borghese has no doubts about the future of pasta: “Ladies and gentlemen, it will never change. It has been the same for thirty years, and so will be”. Spaghetti with tomato sauce are not going to change in twenty or thirty years. He explains it while he is in the kitchen of his restaurant in Milan, The Luxury of Simplicity, in the City Life area. “My ideal place is always in a kitchen, but now also in front of a camera: it’s the combination of my life”. Shortly before the launch of the sixth season of the 4 Restaurants program, produced by Sky and Drymedia and from 24 September on Sky Uno, Borghese is already preparing for the shooting of the seventh season.
The sixth season, he says, will be technically improved, both in direction and technology, but the usual format will remain: “A winning formula doesn’t change, regardless of investments. Landscapes and people make the program. The authors and I look for authenticity, people who are lovers of their job and their territory. We put together four restaurateurs who have a different idea of cooking, some have a new concept, some a more traditional one, but the important thing is to have a story to tell”. From tradition to modernity, this is the path of the cornerstone of Italian cuisine: pasta. According to the chef, this food is still undervalued: “People have to start thinking about pasta itself and not just about how it is seasoned. Pasta has a fragrance, a taste, the quality of the grain and the supply chain, a texture, that expresses the way you feel it under the teeth, then you think about what to use to season it. We must think of pasta as an absolute raw material, which means spending a little more: it is often considered as a mass-food, a little poor, but quality pasta can also cost four euros per half a kilo. We should invest more for the raw material”.
Borghese may have found this attention to the raw material, as well as respect for the local product and tradition, thanks to his visits to Italian restaurateurs. Whenever he couldn’t find this value, he tries to pass it on himself: “There are so many young people who want to work the land, to use local products, to be faithful to their own territory and tradition. I always try to indoctrinate them in this way. But there are also those who don’t know how to cook and have a restaurant, and I can’t explain myself why people keep going there to eat”.
