Molecular dishes. Syphons. Fermentations. Nitrogen. ‘We have to defend Italy from these cuisines, otherwise no one will come to eat in restaurants anymore’. Chef Gianfranco Vissani’s is a frontal attack on modern cuisine. The same cuisine that the world’s most renowned guides now favour.
Three days after receiving a rejection from the Michelin Guide, which also removed the last star from his restaurant ‘Casa Vissani’ in Baschi, in the province of Terni, the 74-year-old chef has decided to remove a few stones from his shoes. And he does it in his direct way, as a Tuscan Doc from the Maremma. “Let’s take low-temperature cooking, which is so fashionable today: it’s all boiled food, immersed in a vacuum and cooked for hours. You can’t even taste it anymore. And then it’s food that can be cooked up to five months before consumption, which is regenerated when it goes on the table. A process, by the way, that increases the risk of having bacteria on the plate’.
Thumbs down also for ‘this fermentation fad. But why,’ he says, ‘do I have to take an apple or a tomato and ferment it, destroying its flavour?’ And fierce criticism of the use of nitrogen: ‘I was there at the Hilton,’ he says, ‘when at a dinner for a thousand people the waiters came into the room and all you could hear was crashing: it was the plates falling to the floor because the people serving them were burning their hands. One of Vissani’s most hated procedures is the use of the siphon: ‘If you make mashed potatoes the old-fashioned way, with Robuchon’s recipe, i.e. with potatoes and butter in equal quantities, it turns out delicious. Mash with the siphon, on the other hand, is just a potato full of air’.
For criticising the choices of the international director of the Michelin Guides, Gwendal Poullennec, many have called him old. But Chef Vissani rejects the accusations: ‘I don’t feel old at all. Look at the fashion world: after years of torn trousers, we are now back to double-breasted jackets. People are changing, they are no longer willing to pay 400 euro to eat molecular cuisine. They want regional dishes. They want transparent fettuccine that melt in their mouths, but these chefs of today don’t even know how to make a proper agnolotto del plin any more, their pasta is too thick. Woe betide those who tell him, however, that he does traditional cooking: ‘I do creative cooking. But I don’t go for the excesses that are fashionable today. For example, I have just finished preparing a Bremen onion soup with peach gratin with gruyere and pomegranate. Today’s cooks would have made a fermented onion’.
However, Italian cuisine, says Vissani, deserves to be recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site: ‘Not for its gourmet cuisine, but for its territorial cuisine, which is made up of culture and rich in history. This, according to the chef, is the cuisine we must defend. From the too much modernity pushed by the guides as well as from imitation attempts abroad: ‘The government,’ says Vissani, ‘must codify Italian dishes and protect them from those who try to copy them and do not do so. Italian cuisine like Parmigiano Reggiano, in short. A PDO to be protected.
Dining and Cooking