My cuisine comes, as mentioned, from my past. From the will to bring back to the heart. The Smell, the perfume, the consistency of the dishes tasted, or prepared, in my first approaches to food. The exact term to use here is “tradition”, that is to preserve and hand down ways and uses, recipes and flavours, ingredients and combinations. And the tradition of my way of cooking is both that of the farmer and that of the fisherman.
I grew up absorbing them both, and the scents of my home, of my childhood, are the ones I will celebrate with this new project: a tribute to memory and, precisely, to my cooking. With the desire to evoke the emotion of familiar scents in the memory of the restaurant’s guests and the pleasure of re-appropriating them whenever they want.
The direct contact between the nose and the brain explains why a simple smell can excite us. For example because, even with our eyes closed, we tie it to certain experiences or people. In short, by also taking care of the smell of our dishes, we will be remembered: we try to make sure that it is a pleasant memory!
In the kitchen, among other things, the sense of smell also affects taste. Without going into boring scientific details, it is enough for us to know that our primitive ancestors used to smell food to understand whether or not it was edible (and this is also done by many animals, think of cats). The merit goes to two processes, called “ortho-nasal smell” and “retro-nasal smell” which, in essence, transform the olfactory signal into a gustatory one, enriching our perception of flavors.
Think about what strikes you the most when you get home around dinner time. What, even before entering the kitchen, suggests that you will enjoy an excellent meal: it is the smell of food that spreads in the air. In reality, speaking of perfume is not correct, and in the case of the kitchen it is better to speak of the generic smell of food.
