The culinary poet

Pic Courtesy/Piyush Charag

Italian restaurateur Massimo Bottura doesn't see food in isolation. For the chef patron of Osteria Francescana, the three-star Michelin restaurant in Modena, food is also poetry. And rightly so. It does take some conviction to not only serve a broken lemon tart, but to also make it one of their signature dishes, wittily named, Oops! I dropped the lemon tart. "To me, the poetry of what we do is the most important thing... having that space where you can imagine and serve a broken lemon tart in the best restaurant in the world is unbelievable and priceless," says the 59-year-old celebrated chef, who came to Mumbai last week to host two exclusive dinners at The St Regis Mumbai priced at an eye-popping Rs 35,000 per person.

Brought to the city by culinary platforms, Masters of Marriott Bonvoy and Culinary Culture, Bottura along with his team presented some of his signature dishes, including his childhood favourite The Crunchy Part of the Lasagne, and Beautiful Psychedelic Beet Not Flamed, Grilled, a dish created as a tribute to English artist Damien Hirst's spin-painted canvases.

We met him the day he had just arrived, and though jet-lagged, he didn't allow it to come in the way of his storytelling. References of art, philosophy, music and his fascination with fast cars drop in every now and then. "My cuisine is deeply Italian, filtered by the contemporary mind. But if you ask me what I do, I would say I compress poetry and passion, art and music into gastronomic experiences," says Bottura, who credits his mother for fuelling his culinary passion.

Edited excerpts from the interview.

Did you find any similarities between Indian and Italian cuisine?
To me, there are two cuisines that are relatable to Italian food. The first is Indian, which is not one cuisine but many cuisines, some of which are in contrast with another, like North and South Indian fare. Back home, while North Italy is greatly influenced by Europe and France, the South of Italy draws from Africa. The second one is Japan. Both Italy and Japan are obsessed with the quality of ingredients, and we both use techniques to sublimate the ingredients and not to sublimate the ego of the chefs.

Chef Massimo Bottura says that the secret to his success is loving what he does "between waking up and retiring at night". Pic/Getty Images

How did your early years influence your life choices?
I grew up under the kitchen table where my mother and grandmother were preparing food to feed our very large family. I'd be there hiding from my older brothers… Growing up like that, with them, was a very emotional exercise. I always saw that table as my safest place in the world. Soon, I started joining my brothers on their gastronomical tours and my brain started evolving, as it did while going to a museum to see exhibitions or while listening to good music. Be it food, music or art, they all are the same, in a way that it is either good or bad. I started obsessing about the quality and that's why I started travelling, getting exposed to many techniques, ingredients and cultures. Over the course of this journey, my reflections became much more complicated and sophisticated, and that's how I got into gastronomy in such a deep manner.

You hail from Modena, which is also the centre of your culinary practice.
Modena is a small town of 2,00,000 people with five theatres, all of which are always booked so people are super stimulated. The opera here runs for 360 days a year. Another important point to note is that Modena isn't just the heart of the food valley, but is also the land of fast cars, which is another passion I have. People here are very competitive. For us the best day is San Giovanni [a competition where the town fights for best balsamic vinegar] and winning the gold medal was one of the most important things ever. People have always been pointing fingers at me, saying that I am ruining their [traditional culinary] culture. For me to win the gold medal for balsamic vinegar means that I am taking care of my tradition more than the others.

You were pursuing law. What led to your entry into the culinary world?
It was my mother who made the invisible visible and pursued my father, saying that "Massimo is a guy with too much energy and if he does something that he doesn't like, we will lose him". She convinced my father to let me go and at that point, I was open to persuasion. Thanks to my brother, I found a very small restaurant in the middle of the country and a week later, I was there confronting real life. I gave up everything else [to pursue my passion], my father didn't talk to me for two years… And, when he did start speaking again, our relationship never recovered. He died in 2014.

You haven't been to a culinary school and yet, your restaurant has been on the list of The World's 50 Best Restaurants for several years.
I grew up in a family where my mother is an amazing cook, not chef. She cooks because she wants to and that's the secret to success - doing what you do between waking up and retiring at night. [Besides] I had to fight this one because my mother took the responsibility for me quitting law. So, I had to put all of myself in doing what I do. I was somebody who was hungry to learn.

How has the pandemic impacted you on a professional and personal level?
A lot of people don't know the meaning of chef. Chef means chief, you are responsible for everything. It is not just chef of cuisine, but chef of everything. I always work thinking about my team first and not myself. In the last two years, we have created four menus, we probably reached the pinnacle of everything, be it maturity or creativity because we had precious time to put to use. After the first wave, we came out with a menu titled With A Little Help From My Friends, inspired from The Beatles' album. In a world where people can't travel, we made them travel through flavours. We created a unique menu for summer and autumn and it won best tasting menu. But when the second wave hit us, we slipped into depression, the mood changed drastically. However, on January 7, 2021, I took my team back to the kitchen to do what we do best - cooking. We started going back to the recipes from the 1950s and '60s. Then out of the blue, I closed the book and we created a menu filtered by the culture and diversity of the team [we have people from across the world]. We dedicated it to the Italian contemporary history of cuisine. So, spaghetti is now going to be served as a dessert and babà, a dessert, is going to be served as a welcome dish. We broke all the rules.

Was it challenging to create a tasting menu for India, which also has a significant vegetarian population?
At Osteria Francescana, a vegetarian menu is more [interesting] than a regular menu because we put a lot of energy, ideas and vision connecting the mental palette to transform the ingredients and bring together a dish. For instance, I made a controfiletto using eggplant. I knew if I could change the texture of eggplant, it would be like white meat so I created a tenderloin of eggplants and then I started lacquering to change its texture. When you taste it, it feels like chewing meat. For pancetta, I used the skin of the eggplant, burnt it, added some powder to it and then lacquered it again. It tasted like veal or eggplants, but you have the same or even stronger flavours on the palette.

Osteria Francescana also got a Michelin green star for sustainability.
Sustainability is a part of my life. You are sustainable in your mind, action and ideas. If you aren't paying fairly to your fisherman, cheesemaker and farmers, or if you throw away the different preparations [for dishes, which may not be needed for the final dish] because you don't care, then that's not sustainable.