Giorgio Locatelli is a man in love. Smiling, cheerful, transparent as few in his world (and that’s why it is so loved by the public, probably). You understand it clearly when at the table of its brand new Locatelli, the restaurant on the first floor of the National Gallery in London arrives Plaxy, his wife. Caress Olives, the black dog who keeps the chef on a leash And who is good under the table, inseparable from his master, and sits, showing off a blue shirt with written “Locatelli pizza”.
“It was a pop up project of twenty -one days that we opened ten years ago: one day I went crazy and bought a pizza oven, and we started there,” says Locatelli, and presents Plaxy like the deus ex machina of her entire career, including the latter adventure. “It is she who dealt with everything, I was busy closing the inn, then there was Masterchef: she took care of every detail, she did an extraordinary job, she gave a touch of beauty and convivism and still today it is she who holds the contacts with the National Gallery”.
Easy to think so, because Giorgio Locatelli is one that public relations are good up to a certain point. A hairless on the tongue, with which it can be beautiful to eat a sauce with the ragù if you are in tune, but perhaps also less, if you are looking for a more diplomatic conversation. At that point, the British style of Plaxy is probably better.
For lunch with Giorgio Locatelli
The new place signed by Locatelli is part of a path that led the chef to close his starry locanda in the Fancy London Marylebone district and to open in one of the most important museums in the world. “Everything is very different here: before we were a destination, now we are a service in a place that is a destination”explains Locatelli. “The form has changed, but not the substance: we always work with the same people, with the same suppliers, keeping the same quality”. However, the dishes are simpler, genuinely Italian, and the expense is more contained: With about thirty pounds you can eat and drink a glass of wine at the table of the first Italian chef who received a Michelin star abroad.
You take a burrata, or a calama with sea chicken, or even a chicken with the hunting with polenta, on the colder days (which in London certainly not lack) and eats by breathing the scent of the Leonardo da Vinci, of the Van Gogh, the turner of the Rubens and the boticles kept in the precious rooms all around. Or let the chef choose, who orders Green olives of Cerignola, a spring salad, Parma ham with balsamic vinegar and then the tagliatelle with ragùsymbol of the symbols of Italian cuisine, with a rain of Parmigiano grated at the moment. “If you don’t say it, it doesn’t stop,” he laughs the chef while on my pasta dish that cheese falls that, wherever you are, makes Italians feel at home.
High catering? “Too restrictive”
In short, a simple cuisine, well -kept but familiar, which also reflects a change of life of the chef. “I am sixty -three years old,” he says. «I still have it, I like a mess to stay in the kitchen. But the intensity of a starry restaurant is an incredible thing, while everything is more relaxed here. It is always an expression of what I think but with less intense rhythms ». Locatelli goes against the current, in a sort of “happy decrease” Which represents what it is and who wants to be: a path made of affections, of plates, of people. «I want to work with the people I like. At sixty, this is something on which I no longer want to compromise ».
And it is something reflected in the new Locatelli restaurant, in fact. That elegant simplicity, set up with the precious help of Plaxy, in which the chef recognizes himself. “Personally, if I have to choose between a three star and a place like this, I choose this life this,” he says. “I got a little stewed about this continuous self -breeze of the chefs and the kitchen. I lost interest in a format for which it takes five minutes to explain a dish and thirty seconds to eat it. I lost interest in this type of catering, I want to do something I like, that I feel mine. The goal of a restaurateur cannot be only to take the Michelin star ».
“The end dining is becoming too restrictive: The customer must come to a certain hour, he must go to a certain hour, he must be dressed as you say, he is explained to him how he has to eat. It is not really part of my way of understanding catering ».
Giorgio Locatelli’s bread: artistic, but poor
The opening of the new Locatelli was almost random. “When we closed the inn the idea was to stop for a couple of years,” he says. «Maybe start thinking of opening a place in Italy. In the meantime, this tender has arrived for the catering at the National Gallery, in which we participated without believing ourselves too much: there were more twenty -one other realities in the race, we did not really think of making it, and instead … ». Instead today, In the cultural institution par excellence of the English capital, an Italian cooks. With its tagliatelle with ragù with Parmesan and, on the ground floor, with His spirits and a cocktail card that collects the creations of the best Italian bartender abroadfrom Simone Caporale of the Sips of Barcelona to Salvatore Calabrese del Velvet.
“The secret was probably in the capacity of what we have always done, and also in the way we manage hospitality and welcome in its entirety”. Thus, the great Italian catering in London has earned an outpost of excellence, in a city that Locatelli describes as increasingly gentrified. “The path I made, that of the young chef who opens his restaurant and is successful, today is practically unthinkable: the rentals in the center are prohibitive and now only the great chains are found”.
In the meantime, at the table arrives The bread, made with Apulian wheat flour, inspired – says Locatelli – at the dinner in Emmaus in Caravaggio. He, he says, arrives at the opening and looks at one or two paintings, then returns to the restaurant, trying to understand what they sent him. “It was the bread that the poor eaten: we put it on the whole table, to be broken, as it was done once”.
That time in Berlin in 89
After lunch, Locatelli accompanies us outside, up to the metro, walking through his London and a trafalgar Square full of tourists. “This city has changed over the years,” he says, and recalls the period of when he was young and a little penniless, and when, in the autumn of 1989, he participated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. “At the time I was Sous Chef at Savoy, and I knew this promoter, Nick Fried, whom we all called Nicola Fritto and who took us around exclusive parties. One day we left for Berlin, guests from one of his friends, also of the tour of music and cool clubs. I fell asleep on the sofa and in the morning I looked for the kitchen to make a coffee and I found myself there Lou Reedas if nothing had happened ».
«I remember as an upsetting image the people who came from East Berlin and sling up in food stores to buy bananas. There were garbage baskets full of banana peels throughout the city because it was a food that had never really found east. Obviously I also went to pick the wall: I took a bag that I found on the ground, perhaps left by those who had bought bananas, and filled it with pieces that year after year I continued to give friends on every occasion. I keep a single, colorful piece of this. That day I felt in a historical moment, and I understood once more the importance of feeling European, to travel free, without visas, without too many checks. It seemed to me – in my little one – that I had fought for a free Europe too, a bit like my partisan uncle was assassinated by the Nazi -fascists during the Second World War “. Of course, something of that uncle remained in Giorgio Locatelli.
Source: Vanity Fair
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