Massimo Bottura and the art of making mistakes

This article is published in number 10 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 16, 2021

Then God created Massimo Bottura. Gave him a destiny from chef, the obsession for music and contemporary art, the New Balance on the feet. He sent it to Modena. He added a detail that would do it all: the art of making mistakes. Because there is a time that the best cook in the world knows how to live more than the moment of cooking, and it is the unexpected of failure. The error, the stumbling, feeling disoriented for an instant and the next instant saying: «Was I wrong? But it’s fantastic! ».

In 58 years of life and an unrivaled career, Bottura has never stopped falling. And to assert the fall. It happened at the beginning of this pandemic, when he used that time of darkness to revive a piece of the Modenese countryside by completing Casa Maria Luigia, his guest house which is also a museum of art and the feeling of living well. It also happened when his sous-chef dropped their most precious dessert: the lemon tart. Bottura saw it on the ground, broken, and began to scream with joy: it is brilliant, it is extraordinary, conceiving one of his most important dishes, entitled Ooops I dropped the tart. The art of error, therefore. Bottura’s secret, which the chef himself told in a television series produced by Michelle e Barack Obama, available on Netflix from March 16. Is called Waffles + Mochi, where Waffles and Mochi are two puppets who wander around the former First Lady’s supermarket and then travel to browse the starry kitchens and the mysteries of food. An adventure dedicated to healthy eating that has the strength to speak to children (but also to parents), arriving as far as Modena to spy on Bottura who is torturing with his son Charlie. Here Waffles and Mochi asked him the most intimate question that I want to reiterate: so making mistakes is okay, chef Bottura? “There is always a moment along the path of creativity when you stumble and fall down. Going down can be considered a misstep. Instead it is an opportunity. If you stumble, fall to the ground and from the ground you look at the world from another point of view, perhaps from the point of view of a child who spies on his grandmother while he rolls the dough, you reconceive the world. From the ground you are the idea. You are the other perspective. Do you know what the worst sin would be? Falling and cursing, then returning to everyday life without a change, a break ».

She is interested in the glimpse of the newspaper. It’s Pirandello.
«I am interested in overturning adversity and seeing the new in it. With the tart I caught that flash. Which is a bit like the mission at the Osteria Francescana: we have 20, 25, 30 year old boys who come from everywhere, a cultural biodiversity to be enhanced even in the unexpected. They should be left to express. If you put them under bad pressure just because they made a mistake, they will never find out. ‘

Do you pass this vision on to your children as well?
“I try to do it with anyone who has the future on their side. In my future there is always the future. It is essential to be able to be alongside those who will grow up by transmitting truths that would remain hidden, showing the territory in which they live, knowing for example that every morning raw milk is transformed into Parmigiano Reggiano through the knowledge of centuries. That grapes can be pressed, boiled slowly, simmered and give shape to a must that becomes balsamic vinegar after twenty-five years. My 24-year-old daughter has not yet tasted her balsamic vinegar which was prepared when she was born. And when she does, she will experience something we thought for her a quarter of a century ago, imagining a distant time ».

It is the same feeling of safeguarding the future that moves Waffles + Mochi.
“This is why I agreed to participate in two episodes of the TV series. Knowing Michelle and Barack Obama I knew I could count on them. Barack is a person of incredible depth. He was trying to change the American health system, one of the revolutions for me that the United States would need.
But above all there is the issue of climate change: he invited me to California to a summit of people with his same vision, aware of the fact that one of the great problems linked to climate change is food waste “.

E Michelle?
“And Michelle, with everything she did in the White House with her garden and healthy food. It has raised public awareness of disastrous food in the South of the United States. He knows how to listen to himself and to listen. The important thing is to listen to each other, understand the perspective and collaborate with people who see it as you. This is how energies are shared, which is what I absorbed from my family ».

What kind of family was it?
«A large family, with five brothers and sisters, three uncles, two grandparents, defaulters and defaulters, friends always at the table. Marco Bizzarri, president of Gucci, called my mom from the school desk to recess at the Barozzi – we were classmates in high school – and said to her: “Luisa, I’m coming to lunch today, what are you doing?”. “Ah Marco, I make mixed fried food!”. “But the passatelli?”. “Okay, let’s make passatelli”. This energy, this feminine vision ».

The feminine vision to which it owes everything.
«Women are the people who have influenced my life the most. First my grandmother, when she convinced me to stop playing football because I was distracted from
study. Then my mother, who during the first years of Law looked me in the face one morning and said: “Massimo, you are not happy. You are someone who has a lot of energy, you have to channel them into something positive. If you think that being a lawyer is not the right thing, look for something different ”».

On the other side was her father who wanted her a lawyer.
«Yes, but I gave up Jurisprudence. And then, in difficult moments, I never gave in precisely because I had to prove to him that my mother was right and not him ».

His mother. Even before his grandmother. And then?
«Lidia Cristoni, the cook who joined me when I decided to be a restaurateur. This lady, practically blind, fired from a Modenese restaurant,
he crossed the countryside every day to come and cook at Campazzo di Nonantola, my first tavern. He had heard from a neighbor of the takeover
and so she had come to tell me her story. I looked at her and told her: “Listen, Mrs. Lidia, put on an apron and show me what you can do”. She went into the kitchen and never went out ».

And after Signora Lidia?
“My wife. Lara opened the door to the unexpected and to contemporary art. It taught me to go deep into concepts. Which is a unique form of love. To teach to dig, and to dig into reality. Teaching to be inspired by others. Picasso used to say: mine is a job where 10 percent is
talent, 90 per cent is hard work and an eye on what surrounds me ».

Picasso also said: «When I was twelve I painted like Raphael, but it took me a whole life to learn how to paint like a child». And here we go back to ability to welcome the unexpected with a purity, always linked to one’s roots.

«You must look at your past in a critical and never nostalgic way, taking it into the future. After I couldn’t go further at Campazzo di Nonantola, I needed to deepen the technique. I knocked on Georges Cogny’s door at Locanda Cantoniera, in Piacenza. And I did it every weekend for two whole years, in the evening, after closing the Campazzo. I was hungry to learn. I went to Georges to absorb all the classical French technique, which I would apply to the Emilian tradition. And then Alain Ducasse, Ferran Adrià, the New York period. And with each one: get involved ».

Also transpire this in Waffle + Mochi: get involved. And play, in the precise sense of the term. In Bottura this child soul is never extinguished.
“My mother used to say I was a tornado as a child. Always on the move, always curious. Indoles that have converged in the greatest interest of my life: emotion. Listening to Billie Holiday singing and out of place her life is what excites me because I feel that the night before she lived what she sang the next day. If Bob Dylan is out of place what difference does it make to me? I want to hear what he is telling me while singing, his poetry ».

The imperfection that makes it unique.
“Of course, the imperfection that is making the invisible visible to me. These are the fundamental things that I am eternally hungry for. “

And how has this eternal hunger reacted to the pandemic and lockdown?
«During the first closure I said to myself: here is a time to dedicate myself to something new. But the spark came from my daughter Alexa who, during a virtual aperitif with friends, came to the kitchen with the phone and started filming me with everyone asking me questions. Then he put it there: “Do you know dad that doing it again could be interesting?”. The next day we connected with Instagram Live and started Kitchen Quarantine. The real contribution was given by Alexa and my wife, and obviously my son Charlie in his pajamas, a disabled boy with the different ability to smile and to break my balls, teasing me with his energy. Crazy success. Result: we win a Webby Award, no one could believe it ».

There was also his beloved music in Kitchen Quarantine?
“The very first thing I did at the start of the lockdown was sort my twenty thousand vinyls in alphabetical order. At one point I came across Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from the Beatles: I photographed it and sent it to my brigade asking to turn it into chewable bites. They came out
recipes we prepared for hospitals, doctors and volunteers. Then on 2 June we reopened the Osteria Francescana with a completely new menu, also evoked by that experience ».

The evolution that comes from a fall, again.
“It is really the crucial point: to understand what is happening to us and to be an active part of a revolution, especially a social one. It is this look that I would like to leave to my children and to those who come to experience my kitchen. Give everyone the opportunity to access a new way of seeing things. And to welcome its beauty ».

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