“The French, they say that the Italians are French people in a good mood”, laughs Giuseppe Cutraro. The Italian, originally from Naples, arrived in Paris a few years ago. Crowned best pizza maker in the world in 2019, he remembers his arrival in France. “Me, I found an incredible level, here, of people who, really, recognize a bad pizza from a good”, he recalls.
He made his first pizza at the age of 15, in a pizzeria in Naples, to have some money for him and his mother. “When you’re a child, you watch a bit of the artistic movements of a pizza maker turning the dough, it’s still interesting. All the kids love it. And I immediately fell in love with this know-how”, explains Giuseppe. A real passion that has endured through the years. “When I cook, I enter a world apart. Me, I don’t feel on Earth, in fact. Already, the sense of touching the dough, of creating things from scratch until it comes to the table to the customer and the satisfaction of the customer who looks at you like ‘I had a good time’, for me it doesn’t there is no job that gives you such satisfaction.”
In 2019, he won the title of best pizza maker in the world in his hometown of Naples. “I wanted to use all the senses of the taste buds that we have in the mouth: the crunchy, the salty, the dulce, the fondant, the fat. It’s a little journey through all the experiences I’ve had around the world”, he explains. He then returned to Paris with the desire to open a restaurant. “On my birthday, March 16, 2020, Macron, on TV, announced the closure of all restaurants in France. I did not know what to do.“Since then, he has been able to reopen his pizzeria in the heart of Paris, with his team,”Giuseppe, like me, Piero-Gigi and Luca”.