Fulvio Pierangelini is executive chef for Sir Rocco Forte’s luxury hotels throughout Europe. He used to run one of the best restaurants in the world. Heston Blumenthal called eating at Gambero Rosso, in San Vincenzo on the coast of Tuscany, “one of the most memorable dining experiences of my life”. Two years ago Pierangelini closed Gambero Rosso, left his wife of 32 years and went to work for Forte. “Before, I made haute couture. Now, it’s prêt-a-porter. But it’s beautiful prêt-a-porter.”
Famous in Italy, where he has cooked for Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, among others, Pierangelini is not well known elsewhere, probably for three reasons. One reason is that for 30 years he refused to fly anywhere, and still hasn’t been to the United States. The second is: “I did not like journalists that did not say I am the best! You say something wrong about me, I don’t see you any more.” The third is his English, which is not fluent, and comes served with a heavy accent.
A fourth reason may be that, while good company, Pierangelini is not a natural populariser, in the Oliver or Ramsay mould. He refuses to put on a chef’s hat for pictures. We go to the market together, and cook what we have bought, but he is not comfortable in the role of tutor, admitting he prefers to be alone in the kitchen. He isn’t angry, rather he is melancholic. An artist not an actor.
Blumenthal drove five hours to sample Pierangelini’s cooking. Other customers would regularly fly for that long, such was the reputation (and the remoteness) of this two-star Michelin restaurant, a reputation the untrained Pierangelini had built from nothing over 30 years. Since he began working for Forte, the hotels’ income from their restaurants has doubled.
I met Pierangelini in Florence, where he was visiting Forte’s Savoy hotel. He is 56, a big, fleshy featured Roman with a mop of curly brown hair, a white dress shirt, cufflinks, an ankle-length apron. You have to tune in to his speech pattern. “I want to watch my spies!” he says at one point. “I’m sorry?” “I want to watch my spies!” “Sorry, not getting it Fulvio, non capisco.” “I want to watch my spies! Tamarindo! Timo! Basilico!” he shouts, “spies! spies! SPICE!”
Still, we got on well, talking pretty non- stop for a day and a half, the conversation fuelled by the colour and candour of Fulvio’s (it’s hard to keep calling such a likeable man by his surname) personality. Fuelled also by rather a lot of Martini, champagne and pinot grigio.
“I drink too much,” Fulvio admits, patting his belly, “two bottles of champagne a day, minimum.” What was supposed to be an interview turns into a foodfest. Whenever the talk lags, Fulvio shuffles off to the kitchen to whip up another dish. “You want something more? What you like? I cook! I love to cook! Yes!”
For dinner he starts with spaghetti pomodoro, “the most simple dish you can have in Italy. It’s not just a dish, it’s a mother, a souvenir, a memory, a family, a dream, a soul, a sadness, a home.” I’ve never given much thought to spaghetti pomodoro but, already tipsy from two stiff Martinis, I find myself nodding emphatically. “It’s a big challenge,” says Fulvio. “When the food is simple it must be perfect.” Fulvio had spaghetti pomodoro on the menu at Gambero Rosso, pricing it the same as spaghetti with lobster. “It was a joke,” he laughs, waving a hand, “a provacacioni.”
To be honest, Fulvio’s spaghetti pomodoro was good, but not great. Maybe I was still full from the vongole of just an hour or two earlier. I’d wolfed that down while Fulvio picked at his. He doesn’t like eating his own food, once cooked, he’s done with it, can only find fault.
In Sicily, at another Forte hotel, he recently lost patience with the local chefs because a diner had remarked on how good the basil tasted in the vongole. “I went in the kitchen I said ‘F***! what you do? You put too much basil in!’ When people say ‘I love your spaghetti vongole with basil’ that is wrong. I want them to think is beautiful without understanding what happened.”
At the risk of national stereotyping, Fulvio talks this way a lot. His two favourite words are “beautiful” and “horrible”. He’s either up, or down, with not a great deal of equilibrium in between. There are elements of the role of executive chef that, he admits, he finds difficult. “I want to stay with Rocco because I am a friend of Rocco. I have ten chefs, ten general managers, ten food and beverage managers, 500 cooks, is horrible for me. Sicily, Abu Dhabi, St Petersburg, f***ing Germany.” He sighs, shrugs, heads to the kitchen.
The next course is sea bass with mushrooms and mashed potatoes. “I relax the brain with the mashed potatoes,” he explains. “Simple food, perfectly made. Why do a bad thing just because you invented it? I prefer you make a perfect veal Milanesi than complicate your food wrong. You are a cook, you are not a genius.”
We arrive at the heart of his philosophy. “Making simple food is like wooing a girl that knows she is beautiful. You must be kind, nice, gentle, you must caress, one mistake, it’s finished.” [Fulvio makes an expansive Italian gesture]. Food with wine and cream and foie gras and cognac, not a problem. If you do complicated, you have ten minutes. If you do simple, you have ten seconds. People think it’s simple, it must be easy. But it’s not easy, it’s hard. To be simple is a point to arrive not a point to start.”
It’s a peripatetic life. Since leaving his wife, he has no home. He lives where he works, a few days in Brussels, Rome, a month in Sicily, Florence, back to Brussels. “I go in a place where there is a chef and my work is to say to this chef, ‘What you do is no good, you have to do what I want.’ I must be diplomatic. And I am not diplomatic. They make all the same mistakes.” He gave up smoking not long ago. If he didn’t drink, he says, “I become a killer. A cook-killer!” One chef on his roster, he confides, strangely specifically, “is one of the four most stupid people in Europe.”
“I give the product,” he goes on, “the recipe, the technique, I show them what to do, but I can’t give a mushroom a sensibility. That is something you have or you have not. I can’t teach this. Spaghetti pomodoro, you put in the tomato when the garlic take colour, but to take colour is complicated, your colour is different from my colour.” He sighs again.
Fulvio likes his new life, he insists, and does not miss having his own restaurant. For 30 years running Gambero Rosso, he says, all he did was work. “I never see television, never go to the cinema, the theatre. I have an idea, I need to go to the kitchen.”
He was (and is) an obsessive, an artist, a perfectionist, scouring the hills and harbours of Tuscany for specific mushrooms, anchovies, tomatoes, ricotta. “Every year when we arrive in September I am so excited because there is the new olive oil. When my olive oil is ready, now for me life is easy.” His olive oil, branded under his name, is from Tuscany. Sicilians, he thinks, tend to harvest their olives too late, a legacy of their traditional poverty, a late harvest yielding a bigger — but inferior — crop.
The two most important ingredients in the kitchen, he says, are “olive oil and to be generous”. He doesn’t appear to have any rules, beyond liberality, for the use of olive oil. Perhaps that generosity is why he didn’t make as much money from Gambero Roso as he might. That, and paying top price for product. He explains at some length why Florentine courgettes are better than other courgettes. They have ridges, and are thus better suited to peeling into spaghetti-like strips. They also cost twice as much. “I say ‘I pay the double and you have to do exactly what I want.’”
Fulvio (with a little menial help from your correspondent) prepares cod with aubergines and courgette cooked four ways. Except one of the varieties of courgette, a sweet version made from the carefully stripped flower, is removed from the oven by the kitchen cook without alerting him, so he bins it. “I don’t like anything here,” he says. “They destroyed the flower!”
“When I say it’s horrible it’s correct,” he wails, looking me right in the eye. “I am not mean, I am too nice! Instead to help me, they kill me! They take the flower out, they didn’t come to me to say ‘chef, the flower are ready’. F***! Horrible f***ing man! I have 500 f***ing cooks like this.”
For what it’s worth, I think Fulvio Pierangelini should calm down, tell Rocco Forte thanks very much and goodbye, and then open up his own restaurant again, and get back in the kitchen.
Cod, anchovies, courgettes
Serves 4
Ingredients
4 fillets of baby cod (nasello)
8 very fresh anchovies
2 large violet aubergines
3 large courgettes
Courgette flowers
1 bulb of garlic
A small bunch of basil
A small bunch of fresh mint
Extra virgin olive oil
Butter
Lemons
Icing sugar
Balsamic vinegar from Modena
Method
Clean cod and anchovies, fillet, wash and pat dry and put aside. Heat oven to 180C. Make small incisions in aubergines and put a slice of garlic inside, place in oven and cook for 15 minutes. Take out of oven and while still hot remove skin from aubergines. Remove seeds, place in a blender and purée. Remove from blender and season with salt, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil and, when cold, chopped fresh basil. Mix together and put to one side.
Open courgette flowers and remove stamen. Wash and dry flowers well. Place on a baking sheet; shake then cover with icing sugar. Place in oven and cook till crispy. Remove from oven and place to one side.
Remove green skin from courgettes with a potato-peeler then julienne courgettes, taking care not to use centre of courgettes. Put internal part of courgettes into a sauté pan with some olive oil and a clove of garlic and salt and cook. When courgettes are ready, check seasoning and crush with a fork and place to one side.
Mix julienne of courgettes with lemon juice, chopped mint, some balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper.
Place some basil and mint leaves on a flat plate, and anchovies, and squeeze lemon over them and leave for three minutes. Put some olive oil, butter and a clove of garlic in a sauté pan. Add cod and cook on a fierce heat until cod is crispy.
To arrange plate, place some purée of aubergine in centre, then cod, then salad of julienne courgettes. Around border of plate, place crushed courgettes, salad of marinated anchovies and crispy flowers.
Pasta with wild mushrooms
Serves 4
Ingredients
200g wild mushroom (porcini)
3 plum tomatoes
A small bunch of fresh thyme
A small bunch of fresh basil
A small bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley
3 pieces of garlic
400g pasta
Extra virgin olive oil
Small piece of Parmesan
Method
Place two pots of water, one big and one small, on stove to boil. While water is boiling, clean mushrooms with a small knife, taking care to remove any woody parts. Rinse mushrooms under cold water, slice into strips, and place on kitchen towel to dry.
Make a criss-cross incision in plum tomatoes and place in small pot of boiling water for 20 to 30 seconds. Remove from water and put in iced cold water to refresh. When tomatoes are cool to touch, remove skin with a small knife. Cut in half lengthways and remove pulp and seeds. Slightly dice tomatoes and put to one side.
Finely chop parsley leaves and put to one side. Reserve stems. Heat a sauté pan, add some extra virgin olive oil and put in peeled garlic, thyme, mushrooms and stems of parsley, and begin to sauté mushrooms until well toasted and a nice colour. Season with a little salt and remove from the heat. Take out garlic, stems of thyme and parsley.
Add salt to large pot of water and cook pasta of choice. When pasta is about 30 seconds from being ready, remove from water and add to mushrooms and begin to mix together with a little of cooking water from pasta. Remove from heat and grate some parmesan cheese into pasta. Add some olive oil to chopped tomatoes, mix together well and finish off with chopped basil and parsley and serve immediately.
Hot chocolate fondant with orange sorbet
Makes 8-10 portions
Ingredients for the fondant
6 whole eggs
¼ tsp cinnamon
1 star anise
2 seeds of cardamon
10 Sichuan peppers
150g sugar
200g soft butter
80g plain flour
200g 70 per cent dark chocolate
10g cocoa
1g orange zest, caramelised
8-10 aluminium foil ramekins or muffin casing
Method
Place six eggs, spices and sugar into a mixing machine and whisk to a stiff sabayon. Meanwhile, rub foil ramekins with butter, dust with flour and put to one side. While eggs and sugar are whisking, place chocolate and butter in a bowl and slowly melt over a bain-marie. When the chocolate and the butter have melted and joined together, reduce the speed of the mixing machine and slowly add the chocolate mixture to the sabayon egg mixture.
When ingredients have been mixed, stop machine and sieve in flour and cocoa and fold in ingredients, then fill foil ramekins. Place chocolate mould in fridge to rest for 30 minutes before cooking. Preheat oven to 220C and cook for 5-6 mins: the outcome should be a nice chocolate crust outside and a warm chocolate fondant centre.
Ingredients for the sorbet
250g sugar
1000g orange juice
Method
Churn in an ice-cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. When ready, remove from the machine and place the sorbet mixture in freezer till ready to use.