Interview with Nicola Dinato

Story of a star chef

Nicola Dinato has been the talk of the town this year: a young chef from Castelfranco Veneto, he has earned a Michelin star for the Feva restaurant, which he runs with his wife and head chef Elodie Dubuisson. He is also competing in the 2015 Chefs’ Cup, working his way to the finals in pots and pans and taste. He has traveled and cooked, tasted and learned, working in the best restaurants around Europe and overseas; just to give you an idea, mention Michel Roux Jr’s Gavroche in London, Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo, Ferran Adria’s El Bulli in Roses and Grant Achatz’s Alinea in Chicago. Like an octopus, he has stretched his tentacles and made very different culinary techniques and experiences his own, interpreting them in original and personal ways. No limits to experimentation. The result? Dishes that amaze, that send the taste buds into juices, explosions of flavor, true Art to be savored and enjoyed with all five senses. He firmly believes in what he does: his cuisine revolves around the ideology of Mother Cuisine and the search for good products, the “real” and quality ones. Those that make, in a nutshell, good food.   We interviewed him for you to get to know him better. And, be sure to keep an eye on him! Let’s start with an inevitable question: now that you’ve earned your first Michelin star, do you also feel you are among the stars? No, absolutely. The Michelin star is a new beginning. For us chefs it is seen as the first graduation. Therefore then the real work begins. If I felt that I was already among the stars, it would mean that I have already arrived, that I have lost touch with reality. Instead, for me, I repeat, it is a starting point and everything has remained the same as before, but the evolution continues and it is true that now I am freer to express myself, I no longer have to act on people’s psychology to propose a dish or a concept, because now the clientele is more educated and already knows where they are going; people listen to me more about the same things I used to say. I find it fun but at the same time rewarding. What does the name “Feva” mean? Feva is the “menda” mia, of the Dinato family. The nickname they used to give to family strains and it has now disappeared. If you investigate everyone has a “menda” from their father and mother. Translated, it is my root, the root of the area where we are. Handing down a tradition is a cook’s job, especially if he or she carries on a mission in the places where he or she was born and raised.   What is the “Mother Kitchen”? Our kitchen is female. The Cucina Madre is the kitchen that starts from the origins of Italian cuisine. A kitchen born and developed by housewives, mothers, grandmothers. It is there that the recipes are born that today for us are common. Born in the home, serving workers, farmers and workers. It is not born and codified at the courts of kings, see the French cuisine where then born in the 60s the Nouvelle Cuisine. With this I want to identify the authentic new wave of Italian haute cuisine. It is a name that I would like to be recognized internationally to identify the Italian gastronomy. Never as in Italian cuisine was so prolific and rich in new talents and content, and we have always assisted the other cuisines (French, Spanish, Nordic, South American) to act as a catalyst for the shift in global gastronomic interest. That is why I am pursuing this mission, that is one of the most difficult. So as a spectator I grew up with the desire to unite all the great cooks in one kitchen and in a simple but identifying name of Italianità, and the only way to create synergy in a people of soloists and individualists is to move the whole operation of union into an artistic movement, with its manifesto: Cucina Madre, precisely, which contains the guidelines, the dictates and the parameters for being part of it. Italian haute cuisine, seen as an artistic movement, may be the only way to combine the dissemination of our knowledge in cooking, our way of working and to ensure that as many aspiring chefs as possible find in the Cucina Madre the foundations on which to build their careers, proud to carry forward a “gastronomic revolution”. To do this we must start from the source: training, with a well-coordinated system of academies and an intelligent communication system, that is, that it manages as much as possible to involve important chefs who marry the manifesto of this artistic and cultural movement. Food, taste and aesthetics: how do you balance these three elements? It’s something natural. Of course, it takes a solid technical base, a sense of taste, a lot of sensitivity, but after a while there is almost a “human” relationship with the raw material: you have to know how to listen and you have to understand how to best enhance it. In addition, experimentation begins, never tried combinations, tests on tests, until, even after years, the storage of a dish in taste, presentation, design of the material. But the beauty of the kitchen is just that: there is room for everyone because it is endless. Countless ways of thinking, combinations, touches, ingredients, techniques, ideas with each time an original result, unpublished. It cannot be seen as a job, it must be seen as art made by craftsmen.   In your menu is the “tiramigiù”: is it a melancholy variant of the “tiramisù”? No, it is the Tiramisù 2.0, a variant of the tiramisu born in the 60s at the restaurant Le Beccherie in Treviso, inspired by the English soup. The original tiramisù was named after its nutritional qualities, Considerable caloric amounts combined with the caffeine of dried cookies soaked in coffee, therefore to “get you on your physical and mental tone”, but that provides an equal stratification of cream and biscuits that is repeated until the last layer with cocoa dusting. While tiramigiù does not come as a “cake” but as a dessert in a glass that has the same ingredients of tiramisù (plus it has only the addition of amaretti in the bottom), stratified at the moment but with different textures and requires that the commensal sink the spoon to the bottom – “down” precisely – to be able to catch all the different textures and flavors. We know that you use local ingredients in international dishes, such as radicchio tempura or salami nikuman: how do your customers react to this “internationalization” of local products? Good. They are inevitable contaminations nowadays, avoid them would be hermits in the kitchen. The important thing is to have a solid base in the territory with its products, its craftsmen and its people, then know how to grasp global nuances and know how to combine them, so that the customer can make a small journey through food, an experience.