Vissani: “In the kitchen? Humility is lacking, everyone wants to go to TV”

“Please don’t wish me well in advance.” Gianfranco Vissani will turn 70 next November 22nd and, speaking with Adnkronos, he shows his superstitious side together with the humble one: an aspect of his character, the latter, to which we are certainly used to thinking of the volcanic and often irreverent chef of Baschi. “70 years of life and activity that I have carried on with joy and pain, like any love story”, says the owner of Casa Vissani, who does not hide a melancholy streak thinking about the company created in the 60s by his parents, “carried out stone after stone, with great sacrifices, by my father and mother and later by me”. “I accepted the challenge of staying here – he reveals – in this small town in Umbria from which everyone escaped after Enel built the artificial lake of Corbara. But I could have gone to America, where there was unbridled luxury, where a thousand clubs open a day and – it’s true – two thousand close, but I’m sure I would have been successful there. But then I decided to stay in the family business and not abandon it, to cultivate the tradition, just like a farmer. My job – he adds – was to innovate regional cuisine. “Among the dishes he revisited over the course of his long career, Vissani fondly remembers some of them linked to his childhood, such as” pizza cooked under the ashes with broccoli and the sausage, really unattainable, the omelette with onions that my mom made for me, the fried rabbit and finally, a must on Sundays, the cow steak that my father cooked on the grill … and then the pasta that my grandmother brought them for dessert and that as a child I waited with trepidation “. Memories that are part of other times, and perhaps of another world, for Vissani, a critic instead of today’s catering:” Instead of cooking, today chefs aspire to go to television, where you earn and have no expenses. But cooking is one thing and entertainment is another “. Gianfranco Vissani says this when speaking with Adnkronos on the occasion of his next 70th birthday, immediately specifying, and freeing himself from a possible and easy objection, that “when I was doing Uno Mattina, I gave advice and recipes, corrected the errors of viewers in the kitchen, I carried on and spread the culinary culture, I didn’t do a show. Instead today we are surrounded everywhere by people who pride themselves on knowing and who snub you, and by radical chic who know nothing “. “The plant, my father used to say, bends when it is small – continues the chef of Casa Vissani, in Baschi, speaking of young cooks – otherwise afterwards it is too late. Today agriculture suffers, you cannot find the staff. immediately managers and chefs, they do not want to make sacrifices, they consider themselves ‘slaves’, while above all at the beginning it takes humility, as well as a great sensitivity. Even the black jacket they now wear in the kitchen is the sign of the times: they feel more fashionable, already arrived, while instead they should wear white to see if they are dirty with sauce. Again – he insists – young people should understand that the starting point is always linked to tradition, not to dishes that are made with siphons and with nitrogen. While the chefs, I would like them to give me the gift for my birthday not to be jealous of their recipes: secrets are useless and it is right for professionals to pass on what they know to children “. Finally, he talks about the “leap into the ravine”, in particular of catering, which he would never have imagined after so many years of work: “Who would have expected something like Covid two years ago? Then, as soon as he arrived, I immediately realized that this was not a joke and I said that it would take at least five years to get out of it. The green pass, the no vaxes and those who for a thousand reasons do not get vaccinated, the battles for reopening: we have faced everything, but the fear of closing at Christmas remains, and there are those who gave their lives to reopen. Today – he concludes – the government would need a politician like Craxi, a decision-maker who was really the tip of the balance and who made the difference “. By Cristiano Camera