Harry’s Bar Restaurant. venice. Cipriani Carpaccio. Veneto. Italy. Europe. (Photo by: Eddy Buttarelli/REDA&CO/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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Speak to any Italian over the age of thirty-five and ask if he or anyone he knows in Italy ever ate raw fish or beef carpaccio. The answer will inevitably be, except for raw clams and oysters, mai! (never). Ask an Italian under the age of thirty-five and he’ll say, certo! (certainly).
Eating raw food has never been an Italian preference, despite crudi now showing up on menus everywhere from Miami to Milan. Beef carpaccio is still reserved for high-end restaurants, although seafood carpaccio (a misnomer, as we shall see) falls more or less under the crudi label. So, too, sushi bars have increased in popularity in Italy’s cities, though they are of very recent vintage.
Famous Venice’s Harry’s bar owner, Arrigo Cipriani, son of original owner Giuseppi, poses in his bar on March 10,2012. AFP PHOTO / Marco Sabadin (Photo credit should read Marco Sabadin/AFP via Getty Images)
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To explain how things changed, largely owing to fashion, is to zero in on three restaurants, two in New York and one in Venice (Italy). The story of carpaccio, a term that has made it into American dictionaries as “noun. An Italian hors d’oeuvre consisting of thin slices of raw beef or fish served with a sauce,” originates at Harry’s Bar in Venice in 1950 when a frequent customer, Contessa Amalia Nani Mocenigo, told the owner, Giuseppe Cipriani, her doctor forbade her to eat cooked meat, so Cipriani prepared a paper-thin slice of beef drizzled with a sauce of mayonnaise, lemon juice, horseradish and milk, naming it after 16th century Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio known for his use of red pigments, resembling raw meat, and whose paintings were being exhibited in a local museum at the time.
Carpaccio caught on at Harry’s and spread to other cities around the world in fine dining Italian restaurants, where it fit in easily on menus that already offered steak tartare. For such a meager dish, it’s somehow always very expensive.
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MANHATTAN, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 18: Poached Halibut with manila clams and chanterelle at Le Bernardin in Manhattan, New York, Friday, September 18, 2015. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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Then, in 1986, the chef-owner Gilbert Le Coze of the luxury French restaurant Le Bernardin in New York decided to do a turn on carpaccio, using a pounded slice of black bass, dressed with basil, coriander and olive oil, which was completely novel for a French restaurant in New York or Paris. It caught on immediately and opened the door for any similar dish to be called a carpaccio, which in Japan was, of course, already well known as sashimi.
BEVERLY HILLS – JANUARY 1997 : Master sushi chef and Japanese restauranteur Nobu Matsuhisa shows off a sashimi dish at the counter of his first restaurant “Nobu” in Beverly Hills California USA circa 1997 (Photo by Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)
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Sashimi, and its sister sushi, was nowhere to be found in Italy, Paris or any American city until chef Nobuyoshi Kuraoka put it on the menu at his New York restaurant named Nippon in 1963. But its impact was fairly localized until Nobuyuki Matsuhisa began blending Peruvian spices, including chili peppers, to his sashimi at his namesake restaurant in Los Angeles, then, in 1994, with celebrity partners that included Robert DeNiro. Eventually Nobu opened 54 restaurants around the globe (as well as hotels and residences), including Milan, Rome and Forte de Marmi. So, too, a global chain of London-based sushi restaurants under the name Zuma, opened a branch in Rome, while fashion designer Giorgio Armani added his name to Nobu’s in Milan. The Michelin Guide even awarded stars to Shiroya in Rome and Iyo Kaiseki in Milan.
TORONTO, ON – MAY 30: Robert De Niro and Chef Nobu Matsuhisa attend the Nobu Residences Toronto unveiling plans with Nobu hospitality press conference at Nobu Sales Centre on May 30, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by George Pimentel/Getty Images)
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Italian chefs were canny enough to promote the idea of carpaccio in myriad forms, but they also knew that putting sushi and sashimi on their menus would be like adding dim sum or tapas. So they simply changed the name to crudi, which means, simply, raw. Crudi are now so ubiquitous that it appears on menus from Palermo to Genoa, especially seaside towns whose menus have traditionally been seafood-based. Recently in the small town of Pulignano a Mare in Puglia at a trattoria called Casa Mia, I enjoyed a range of crudi including shellfish and orata. Il Turacciolo in Andria has a whole section of the menu devoted to carpaccios.
This was not always the case, and older generations of Italians still won’t eat raw fish, making the same face children do before they’ve even tasted a new food. But everyone else, everywhere else has adopted raw seafood, by whatever name it goes by, as an international dish. Of course, marinated fish has been a staple of Nordic countries for centuries, but fashion has nothing to do with that.
Dining and Cooking