The Book Festival continues all weekend in Paris, with Italy as the guest country. The opportunity to take an interest in Italian cuisine.
It’s tasty, sunny, and cheap. Italian cuisine is really popular with the French. But watch out for the traps. Its popularity encourages counterfeiting. A real carbonara has no bacon bits, and the chorizo is Iberian. To eat Italian well, you have to find a real Italian cook, like Massimo Mori, owner of three restaurants in Paris, including one starred.
“The strength of Italian cuisine is its unique terroiremphasizes Massimo, the excellence of its products, it is in season. It’s a poor cuisine that has evolved over time, it’s peasant cuisine, tasty, colorful, with a strong identity, and it’s a cuisine of women who transform the product for the benefit of their families. It is different from the more intellectualized French cuisine, with strong creativity, and above all carried by men.
A more complex kitchen than it seems
It is also said that the French are the aces of technicality and the Italians the kings of the product. At Massimo Mori, you will eat exceptional vegetables, like nowhere else, right now castrate, the little artichokes of Venice. And in winter its red salad from Treviso which is crunchy to the bite.
François-Régis Gaudry, our colleague from France Inter and author of We are going to taste Italydefends the diversity of this Italian cuisine: “We reduce it to a few totems that have been around the world: pizza, pasta or tiramisu. In reality, it is much more complex. We don’t eat the same thing at all in northern Italy in Trentino-Haut- Adige, near Austria, than in Sicily a few hundred kilometers from the coast of Africa.”
However, the image of the Mama who feeds her clan is not completely false, for François Régis Gaudry who will be on Sunday April 23 at the Paris Book Festival to talk about this Italian cuisine. Cuisine to be savored everywhere in France: there is surely a good Italian near you.