Our food is racing towards UNESCO recognition, but amid restaurant closures, declining quality and rampant delivery, a movement of chefs is born who return to tradition and put the stars aside
Alfa is the fake carbonara sauce sold complete with the tricolor in the European Parliament supermarket in Brussels, a clear falsification of our products in the sanctum sanctorum of political correctness. The Omega is the award ceremony with rich prizes and cotillions of the new Michelin stars in Parma, a week ago. From which it can be deduced that the so-called fine dining is an end in itself. In the middle there are 195,670 restaurants with the addition of 3,849 collective catering companies that deal with feeding Italians: from banquets to delivery with an exponential growth of dark kitchens, which are the equivalent of the sauce of white petrol pumps: they have no brand, it is known that they produce ready meals to be delivered with a deliveryman to those who ask for them. They exploded during the forced confinement of Italians due to Covid.
And it is legitimate to ask how much distance there is between these food assembly lines and the self-referentiality of the critics, the sponsors, the beautiful world of cuisine who found themselves at the Teatro Regio in Parma and who are perfectly aware of living a fiction? Almost none of the starred restaurants would be standing if there weren’t banquets, collaborations, consultancy, advertising and television appearances. The alternative is for chefs to stop being chefs and become entrepreneurs by offering the offer in many places to meet different targets. This is the case of the multi-starred chef Enrico Bartolini who has a chain of restaurants – so does everyone starting from Alain Ducasse -, of Antonino Cannavacciuolo, of Moreno Cedroni – who however has never given up on gastronomic research – and of the Alajmo group.
If fine dining didn’t feed on the spectacle of the kitchen it wouldn’t survive. The managers of Michelin know this very well and with the 2025 edition they have closed down traditional cuisine: they only reward the “artwork chefs” or those who have investors behind their backs. And so here is the big question that no one has the courage to ask themselves in recent weeks: does Italian cuisine exist? Even better: is there still Italian cuisine given that ours is a vernacular gastronomy that depends on local products, having never had court dishes for the simple fact that we didn’t have a ruling and unifying house until 1860?
The question is not far-fetched because in two weeks the UNESCO intergovernmental committee will meet in New Delhi which should decree – the technical committee has already voted yes – that Italian cuisine is an intangible heritage of UNESCO. The French, Koreans, Japanese and Mexicans had this recognition before us, but it is the first time that a cuisine has been highlighted not for the dishes, but for the gastronomic culture it expresses. Which means reiterating – as explained by the Minister for Food Sovereignty, Francesco Lollobrigida – who fought hard together with both the Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Tajani, the first sponsor of the week of Italian cuisine in the world, for this recognition – that ours is not the cuisine of French sauces, nor of the Ferran Adrià season with siphons and the creed of “todo es química”, but it is cuisine “agricultural”.
Michelin must not have noticed and the Barnum circus of our pans is too busy in self-celebration to wonder if by taking away the last star from Gianfranco Vissani the UNESCO pronouncement was killed in the cradle. The chef from Baschi is perhaps the last witness to that gastronomic rebirth of Italy which started at the end of the Sixties with Angelo Paracucchi, passed through the Trigabolo of Argenta – it is no coincidence that none of the magnificent chefs of the Ferrara restaurant today have their own table: there are those like Bruno Barbieri who live from television and those like Igles Corelli from consultancy -, which took shape in the greatness of Gualtiero Marchesi and today is forgotten. The reason? Those who don’t have stars, don’t have investors behind them and have to work hard to make ends meet, have little time for the show and above all are besieged by often unfair competition: today to open a restaurant all you need are microwave ovens and the right supplier.
On the Internet you can buy all the ready meals you want. A pasta and chickpeas in crock (complete with container) costs 3.25 euros, a cacio e pepe costs 3.75 euros, the sliced beef is worth 6.40 euros. They are single portions: just heat them up and have them served by young people hired as needed. Those are also called restaurants. A demonstration comes precisely from the new stars: they have been given to those who, having nothing to do with gastronomic culture, can afford the luxury not of going to the restaurant, but of having the restaurant where they hire a highly paid successful chef, preferably young and who does not perfectly Italian cuisine.
Except for some very praiseworthy exceptions such as the Cerea brothers, Enrico and Roberto, who have made Da Vittorio a Brusaporto a sort of gastronomic holding where tradition is cooked at the highest possible level and a turnover of over 90 million is achieved, involving the whole family and having used the three stars as the driving force of a business that goes from production to banquets. But the rest of the firmament that gastrofighetti like so much stands out. Italians do not want, or perhaps cannot, spend. To the point that today the starred restaurants force the customer to order at least three courses or the tasting menu otherwise they won’t be able to deal with the costs.
The cake that goes out of home is 96 billion, which is less than a third of Italians’ food expenditure and the ones who inflate restaurant revenues are foreigners who, especially in art cities, are besieged either by often tacky street food or by all the same places: in Rome only carbonara, in Florence only steaks, in Venice only bigoli or cicchetti, in Naples only spaghetti “avvongole” and “pummarola n’coppa”. Result: local dishes disappear from the menus and the quality plummets. Starting with the service: 80 percent of the establishments cannot find waiters and the turnover is rapid. Salaries that are too low, exhausting shifts, especially in tourist restaurants which are calorie pushers rather than restaurants where they work all the time, very little attention to professionalism.
The proof that this restaurant is no longer successful is in the numbers: 61.7 percent of chefs are missing, 58 percent of waiters are missing in a sector where difficult to find hires are calculated at 604 thousand, with hotel institutes that do not churn out more than 35 thousand graduates (between kitchen and dining room) per year. Moreover, the wages are low: the chefs do not earn more than 1,800 euros, the waiters do not reach 1,400 euros and they are all subject to seasonal contracts. Despite the fact that prices have risen: the catering sector has made average increases of 3.6 percent, well above the inflation rate.
This is why a new restaurant is coming forward: that of farmhouses with kitchens of which there are 13 thousand in Italy, but above all artisan chefs. They are the butchers, cheesemakers, bakers, but also traditional chefs who, tired of being denied the opportunity to open the table because they necessarily have to be traders, have decided to reclaim their professionalism. There are very illustrious examples such as Dario Cecchini in Panzano in Chianti, such as Luca Gambacorta who in Casco dell’Acqua, between Trevi and Foligno, officiates the grill as a consummate connoisseur of meat, such as Peppe Zullo in Orsara di Puglia, Pietro Zito in Montegrosso (Barletta). And even Massimo Bottura from Modena, the prophet of starred cuisine, said of himself: «I am a craftsman obsessed with quality, for me cooking is craftsmanship».
Thus, Cica-E was born six months ago in Verona, which is the new Confederation of chefs and artisans headed by Fabio Tacchella, which joins another initiative of artisans in the kitchen, that of Sapereartigano. Just as the gastronomic prominence of traditional tables is growing. It is the return of the trattoria, understood as a treasure chest of Italian cuisine. We will soon know if it will also become a UNESCO heritage site.
