In Search of La Nuova Cucina

By Michael Demarest.

Italian restaurants sizzle with invention and controversy

Now that the dollar is worth princely piles of lire, Americans in Italy should be getting more of everything for less, right? Yes, unless they happen to be gastronomical pilgrims in search of the Continent's current culinary wonder, la nuova cucina italiana, the new Italian cooking. In this case, the less-is-more rule applies. Also, less for more. La nuova cucina is found in expensive, often formidably serious restaurants, most of them in Northern Italy, where the fare is spare, artfully presented and somewhat outlandish. Surprising and a bit haughty, it has often been compared with the French nouvelle cuisine.

Whether the new cooking style is delicious, desirable or even Italian, it has fueled debate as torrid as peperoncino. Italians are proud of their traditional cuisine and are particularly roiled by the notion that some ambitious local chefs are trying to Frenchify their food. The innovators are on the march, however. The Milan-based magazine Italian Wines & Spirits has reported, with some hyperbole, that they "are gradually transforming the laws and principles of the nation's great culinary tradition ... The germs of the nuova cucina spread at the rate of a contagion."

The traditional cooking under challenge is usually described as la vera, antica cucina italiana, the true, ancient Italian cuisine. It consists of some 20 distinctive regional cooking styles that, for all their diversity, share a profusion of superb vegetables, game, fish and meat (Italians are the world's leading consumers of veal). Instead of aiming for symphonic blends of flavors, Italian cooking pays primary attention to natural tastes and textures and fresh ingredients. Pasta and in some regions rice dishes are an essential part of the vera cucina. Its dishes are characterized by locally produced sausages, hams, cheese, breads and wines.

In France, it is said, there is only one way to make a bechamel sauce; in Italy, salsa bolognese can be interpreted 50 ways. As Waverley Root observed in The Food of Italy, "While French cooking has become professional cooking even when it is executed by amateurs, Italian cooking has remained basically amateur cooking even when it is executed by professionals. It is, in short, home cooking, la cucina casalinga, human, lighthearted and informal."

Italians are notably chauvinistic about their food, but they have been traveling more in the past decade or so, especially in other European countries, and have been introduced to different adaptations of similar raw materials. They are also watching their weight. Good Italian cooking has never been particularly heavy, but people now want to cut down on its bounty. Fifteen years ago, ordering a half-portion of pasta was uncouth; now it is common. Nino Castorina, owner of Bologna's Notai, serves a slice of beef that is only 60% as large as what he used to offer; he is not economizing, just giving customers what they want.

Independent-minded chefs have responded to this appetite for change by nudging the casalinga out of the cucina. Their efforts involve a considerable sophistication in blending flavors and textures. Vegetables are palpably fresh. Cooking times have been reduced to enhance flavor; many vegetables are now steamed, which is a break with the Italian tradition. More virgin olive oil or walnut oil is used in the north, where butter has historically been preferred. Sauces, if any, are served under the food, not over it, and herbs are used with greater subtlety.

Like nouvelle cuisine, the new style favors exotic combinations, such as meat fillets with green peppers and soybeans, risotto with strawberries and nettles, and sweet-and-sour sweetbreads. Some commonly used ingredients are hallmarks, even cliches, of nouvelle cuisine: kiwi fruit, raspberry syrup and vinegar, thinly sliced duck breasts served nearly raw. The chefs also pay attention to lightness. Says Carluccio Brovelli of Sole on Lake Maggiore: "I don't fry. I don't use butter. I don't use cream." Last, but by no means least, they pay attention to presentation. A dish must be bello da vedere, good-looking.

The most controversial departure by far is in the primo piatto, the first course, which follows the antipasto and is traditionally pasta or risotto. The creators of nuova cucina have almost declared war on pasta. Gualtiero Mardiesi at one point eliminated it entirely from the menus in the Milan restaurant that bears his name, then compromised by serving tagliolini with cheese sauce after the main course. Marchesi later yielded to the extent of offering a cold spaghetti platter or a dish of precisely seven pieces of penne with asparagus tips and black truffles. "Why should I make pasta like the others?" he demands. "People expect research from me, discoveries."

At Antica Osteria del Ponte in Cassinetta di Lugagnano, the only pasta dish on the menu one recent evening was fish-filled ravioli served, like Chinese won tons, in a soup. Says Owner-Chef Ezio Santin: "A good plate of spaghetti all'Amatri-ciana even my 70-year-old mother can make. But the ravioli you had here can only be done by a professional chef." Other innovative variations on classic pasta include ravioli stuffed with pureed asparagus tips and cheese, tagliatelle (thin ribbons made of chestnut-flour dough) with a sauce of wine and venison, and gnocchi with Gorgonzola.

No-noodle menus have become the focus for a variety of complaints about the new cooking. "It's not Italian," says Arrigo Cipriani, owner of Harry's Bar in Venice, a proudly traditional restaurant. What Cipriani and other critics mean is that it is French. Some practitioners of nuova cucina make no secret of the fact that they are aiming for a fusion of French and Italian culinary techniques. Indeed, several of the country's most brilliant younger chefs apprenticed in France. Valentino Marcattilii, 29, head chef at San Domenico in Imola, honed his art at four celebrated French establishments: Paul Bocuse, Troisgros, Pyramide and Roger Verge's Moulin de Mougins. Even the term la nuova cucina is strongly opposed by some food experts on the ground that the appellation makes it sound as if the new style is simply France's nouvelle cuisine, Italian-style. In November 1981 the Club della Mela d'Oro, a prestigious association of restaurateurs, chefs and food critics, passed a resolution to the effect that the new-style cooking should be referred to only as cucina italiana moderna. So far, the term has had little acceptance.

The new approach is quickly spreading to the U.S. Two of Manhattan's outstanding Italian restaurants, Adi Giovannetti's II Nido ,and Gianni Minale's Alfredo on Central Park South, are basically nuova. Alfredo Owner Minale felt that even the best Italian restaurants in the U.S. have interchangeable fare and have "become boring." With Chef Vincenzo Mazza he has completely renovated the menu. In California, Piero Selvaggio's Valentino in Santa Monica and Mauro Vincenti's Rex in Los Angeles have built their reputations on the new cooking.

Pina Bellini, who does most of the cooking at La Scaletta, an intimate place in Milan, says she has borrowed from the French but concludes philosophically that a great dish "comes from the heart." Some protagonists of the new style maintain that it basically descends from the cooking of the Renaissance, when Italy was Europe's most civilized country and its food the most advanced. Gianluigi Morini, the owner of San Domenico, amis to revive the cooking of the old nobility. In his rather cold, big-city establishment, Marchesi wants to elevate Italian cooking to "high culture." Angelo Paracucchi, proprietor of the innovative Locanda dell'Angelo in Ameglia, speaks of the need for more "professional chefs."

What the visionary Italian chefs foresee is a tune when their country is full of highly sophisticated, handsomely decorated restaurants like their own, with more imagination and versatility in the kitchen. The result may be an amicable culinary coexistence, as in France, where provincial and bourgeois food flourish side by side with haute and nouvelle cuisines. Chef Santin admits, "I hope people will not come to like only this type of cuisine because there should be two levels." And will nuova cucina remain essentially Italian? Replies Marchesi: "If one succeeds in creating a grand cuisine--if this cuisine is art--then it is universal. If it is universal, it doesn't have any frontiers." Or labels. --By Michael Demarest. Reported by Barry Kalb/Rome

With reporting by Barry Kalb, Rome This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.