My past has made me what I am today.
“Look inside yourself and go back in time a few years…something we all do relatively often, in order to better understand our own baggage – what we’ve taken personally and professionally that we carry with us. Detach yourself for a couple of hours…unplug and take a break from reality – from the moment in time that we’re living – to take refuge in the years you were a child. I was a bravo ragazzo (a good kid), always dreaming and eager to grow up to do “grown-up things”, with a quasi-spastic desire to burn the stakes. I was a child that quickly became an adult, starting to work when I was still young out of necessity. Every day – summer to winter – I can’t tell you how many miles I pounded by bicycle to arrive punctually at the bar that had employed me. Every day was more or less similar to the one before it. Only today have I realized how different they all were. Every day I learned, peeping into the pastry kitchen to see what the “grown-ups” were preparing. And yet it still wasn’t clear to me what I wanted to do in life, though there was an internal push to figure it out, to make sense of everything and to study… in my own way. At age 17 I uncovered my desire to be a protagonist in the food and wine world while I was conducting a self-inflicted study between a book by Sciascia and one by Pirandello. In those years, I had a different vision about the cultural implications of film and was passionate about jazz. Looking back, my job in that bar was perhaps the luckiest and most significant employment of my life: I contributed to my family economically but also began to breathe with full lungs the scent of well-made food. To be completely honest, those years were also marked with regret, among which the misfortune of neglecting to finish my studies; a void that I tried, and try, desperately to fill by devouring books and literature with an enthusiasm and appreciation for learning that curses through my blood still today. Here, in my down time – mere moments of pause from the vortex of my work, which, without a doubt, repays for all of the sacrifices made – I still find the child who wanted to grow and interpret his home territory though good food. As a father, I always tell my daughter to start taking baby steps in the workforce by creating a foundation, not by thinking you could already be ready to sustain serious commitments or take on responsibilities greater than yourself. But it’s not always easy to convey this to your kids. As a chef, I invite the young cooks and the new dining room staff to test their limits in committing themselves in order to grow. Observing who has yet to learn and who is cut out for this work is a task to take seriously, and one which must be carried out constantly: in this business, I can assure you that it is never obvious. As for me, I continue to forge ahead, never forgetting the Ciccio that took his first steps into the workforce with a desire to consume the knowledge surrounding him.”
