Chef - Locanda Nocera
«Simplicity is the most complicated thing there is.»
For years my life had the sound of air conditioning. I sat in an office, I was responsible for a multinational information technology company, and outside the window Rome was cooking without me. I was fifty-two years old when I realised I couldn't put it off any longer. It was 2016. I got up from my desk and never went back.
I was not born a chef, I wanted to be one. I started out self-taught, at the cooker at home, cooking for friends on Sundays. They would eat and I would look at their faces: it was there, in those looks, that the dream was hatching. Then I did things properly. A course at the Gambero Rosso Academy, more courses, and finally the internship at Giuda Ballerino, when Andrea Fusco was in the kitchen. At an age when many think about slowing down, I was an intern. I was learning to hold the knife, to read a season, not to be in a hurry with the bottom of a sauce.
Then came the Locanda. I had imagined it a thousand times, hidden as it is, inside the greenery of the Appia Antica Park, between the tennis courts and padel courts, in Via Viggiano. A place you have to look for to find it - and I knew it would not be easy. It had to open in the very days when the world stopped for the pandemic. We reopened on 8 July 2020, and from there came the difficult years: the virus, then the war, the prices going up. We went on with our heads held high, on our way.
My cooking is simple, but simplicity is the most complicated thing there is. There is Rome in my dishes, there are the fried artichokes with mint mayonnaise, there is the roasted octopus on hummus, there are the seven-grain fettuccine with porcini mushrooms and hazelnuts. But if I have to point to just one thing, I'll tell you the homemade egg noodles with sausage and asparagus ragout: a little good grease on the bottom, a hint of acidity that doesn't hurt. The apotheosis of simplicity. In the evening the pinse also arrive, freshly baked.
They tell me they are a 'guarantee', the customers, and I pass between the tables greeting them one by one, because a dish is only half the job: the other half is the face of the person tasting it. Gambero Rosso has put me in the guidebook, even television has passed by. But the thing I am most proud of is another: that at a certain age I had the courage to turn around and look at that desk, and really leave.
It's called Locanda Nocera. Hard to find, they say. But that's the beauty of food stories: they have to be sought out.
«A dish is only half the job: the other half is the face of the person tasting it.»