In his treatise about the gentle art of eating, The Physiology of Taste, the 19th century gastronomic philosopher Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin can be more than a tad de trop. However, there is considerable merit to his contention that fine dining ought to combine Attic Elegance, Roman Luxury, and French Subtlety.
In our own age, I have often despaired that fine dining more usually evidences a less exalted trinity: an aesthetic of oriental minimalism, wacky American nutritional paranoia combined with pastoral fantasies of small family farms and deep sea fishing, and—especially when it comes to the selection of ingredients—a geography that seems derived from the major airlines’ notion of the functional proximity of hub-cities (ignoring all the places in between).
Obviously there is much to be said in favor of throwing off the shackles of distance and the order of the seasons, even in the kitchen, but the legerdemain of assembling the foodstuffs of five continents at a single sitting has seldom managed to entrance me, regardless of how well it may be done.
In fact, even after a decade’s residence in Italy in the 1990s, I continued to maintain a tourist’s strongly prejudiced preference for traditional regional specialties. While many of my Italian friends loved vaunting their comparatively new class of celebrity chefs, and were proud of the innovations of Italy’s “creative kitchen,” both invariably seemed far too reminiscent of all I left the United States to escape. And accordingly, for a long time, the more I heard about Cesare Giaccone— Piedmont’s most singular celebrity chef— known to the world, like Michelangelo or Raphael, solely by his given name “Cesare” (pronounced, CHEY-sar-ray), the less I liked the sound of him.
*
But Cesare was a name that kept coming up, especially among the leaders of Italy’s wine trade. The stories that circulated about Cesare suggested a somewhat erratic eccentric. “An artist, not simply a chef,” they’d say. “Someone who styled himself an Academician of the Kitchen.” “Pazzo!” (Completely crazy!) you’d hear, the speaker circling his ear with a forefinger. (When applied to chefs, however, this word always conveyed considerable affection and a measure of respect).
There were the three years that Cesare had spent living without watch or mirror. His period of heavy drinking. (At one point, according to the generally accepted legend, Cesare’s four-bottles-of-wine-a-day habit would begin with two bottles of the world’s most celebrated dessert wine, Chateau D’Yquem, for breakfast.)
Then, there were Cesare’s dealings with the Guide Michelin. Awarded a star soon after opening da Cesare at a modest and hard-to-find location in the tiny Piedmont hamlet of Albaretto della Torre, he had called Paris to complain, and begged his name be removed from the famous red directory of Europe’s best restaurants. Michelin, though apparently surprised, reluctantly agreed. However, since there was still almost a year to go before the next edition, Cesare felt obliged to post a sign on his door in several languages warning “If you are here because you read about me in the Guide Michelin, please don’t enter.” Press accounts of Cesare (at least when his efforts to discourage attention failed and there were press accounts) tended to reinforce the portrait of him as a xenophobic iconoclast.
One Italian journalist asked rhetorically, but declined to answer, whether Cesare was Italy’s Greatest Chef, and then went on to describe the physical torture Cesare routinely underwent in his invention of a new dish—an ordeal the description suggested was not unlike childbirth and involved at least two days of fasting and a fever.
Nonetheless, Cesare’s fans and defenders were adamant in their praises. Angelo Gaja, generally regarded as the country’s leading wine maker, was among the most skillful of those who argued Cesare’s case. While he conceded Cesare’s restaurant was comparatively modest with family style service and a wine list that was “nothing special,” Cesare himself, Gaja maintained, was a talent with almost unimaginable technical skills. Besides, said Gaja, Cesare’s genius for inventiveness rooted in local tradition was without rival. Gaja was particularly impressed by Cesare’s ability to prepare—alone and without the usual army of assistant chefs—thirty or more five-course meals at a time. And, said Gaja, every plate would be perfect—each course, each sauce, each flavor at once harmonious but distinct. “But was he Italy’s Greatest Chef?” I asked. “Well. . .,” said Gaja, “yes.” If cornered, he was prepared to argue even that.
Convinced I had conceived the most daunting of protocols I countered, if Cesare were really as good as all that, he should have no difficulty keeping one entertained for a week of meals running—after all, once upon a time, this was counted among a typical housewife’s major duties. Gaja was amused and thought Cesare would be intrigued. Gaja decided he’d call him. Thus, a few days later I found my dare had been taken up and everything arranged: a room at the restaurant, a bicycle or some way of getting around, and seven day’s board.
**
When I imagined that week, I saw myself with my “golden fork” in hand at a damask table with oversized crystal glasses and an endless shuffle of fine china being laid out before me. In a notebook, I’d enter my disinterested appraisals of a succession of dishes, coolly assessing their presentation, judging their faithfulness to tradition.
Day by day, I assumed, my sated self would grow more critical whilst a belt notch thicker, leaving my corner somewhat reluctantly to go the next culinary round. Oddly enough, I gave little thought to life beyond this imaginary table. And I never focused on the pleasures that might await me. Odder still, I failed wholly to wonder what Cesare might be like or what it’d be like to spend an entire week at his side.
***
But whatever I might have imagined, the reality of my arrival at da Cesare—four o’clock one hazy afternoon, after a nine-hour railway journey in the damp heat of late summer— came as something of a surprise. Cesare opened the beat-up screen door to his kitchen to greet me. Short, middle-aged, with thinning sand-colored hair, he sported a magnificent, carefully groomed mustache. Cesare’s simmering stockpots made a strong first impression. Veal, rabbit, carrots, celery, chicken, beef, tomato, bay leaf, basil, sage, and rosemary swam in huge copper pots on a pair of oversized square stoves, and filled one’s consciousness with something at once friendly and ambrosial— redolent of hardy rural versions of Mom, Love, and Home.
Cesare cordially offered me a glass of Arneis wine. He was standing at a cutting board, trimming a beef filet with a knife, sharpened over years of use to a pointy sliver. He looked up, regarding me pleasantly. “How, exactly, do you want to spend your week?” This was not an unreasonable question. Perhaps, I suggested, feeling my way, in vaguely poetic but not particularly grammatical Italian, I could be “your. . . shadow.” Cesare beamed and appeared somewhat relieved. “Bene,” he said. “Andiamo.”
And go we did. As soon as we’d stepped outside onto the unpaved parking lot, Cesare lit an American Parliament (which I would find he chain-smoked almost incessantly, especially while driving), and donned a baseball cap with a cardinal red brim, motioning me into his battered gray diesel engine station wagon. Cranking up a cassette of early ‘70s Italian pop music and the air-conditioning, we sped out of the gravel parking lot and down one of the winding two-lane roads that link Piedmont’s sprawl of tiny villages. We were heading to one of Cesare’s several butchers, a couple of towns away. “He’s the best for goat,”Cesare said, taking his hands off the steering wheel for emphasis, tipping his cigarette into a very full ashtray, and looking me in the eye when he spoke, to avoid being impolite.
Cesare’s veal and beef, he explained, came from another butcher. Chicken or more precisely, capon, came from a farm about 40 km away. There were also hunters, men who raised truffle dogs and searched with them for wild white truffles in the local woods, mushroom sellers, a variety of cheese mongers, bakers, chocolate makers, and vintners—all of whom had to be visited personally on a regular basis.
Endless rounds of such long distance afternoon shopping figured prominently in Cesare’s weekly schedule, followed immediately by Cesare’s initial round of preparation for the evening. Then Cesare would take his daily two-hour afternoon nap, and return to a whirl of activity after downing a medium-size pot of oil-black espresso in a rapid series of gulps.
Since the restaurant policy required customers to make reservations at least a day in advance, and since 10-30 covers was the norm, (with no table turnover), there was almost no guesswork involved in Cesare’s shopping. He really was the ultimate one-man symphony orchestra of the Piedmont-cooking world.
He asked me about living in Venice and New York. And as men will, we talked about women, before moving onto Italian politics, music, and other cities we both liked. Invariably he egged me on with an enthusiastic “Porca Miseria!” or “Caspita!”— rough colloquial Italian equivalents to “No way!”
Cesare and I found ourselves swapping endless stories, and gradually I began to piece together his saga as a chef—a career as fraught with unlikely twists and turns and as many ups and downs as the two lane highways we traveled.
His father had lived in the same village as Cesare, kept a milk cow, raised a few chickens in the backyard, grew vegetables in the garden, and operated a modest trattoria offering simple home cooking. He also did a little barbering on the side to make ends meet. The place was a favorite with local workers, and far too simple to be called a “restaurant” (which really did not come into existence in rural Piedmont until the late 1960s). As a teenager, Cesare had left home to work in hotel kitchens and fancy restaurants around the country, and eventually became a private chef to a number of wealthy families in northern cities like Genoa.
Ultimately, Cesare was hired by a flamboyant priest who ran one of the country’s first retreats for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. The two men grew close enough that Cesare was allowed to borrow the padre’s Rolls Royce on his days off. But the appeal of opening his own place and the lure of his own village beckoned, and Cesare eventually opened “il Ristorante Dei Cacciatori” (one of Da Cesare’s several alternate names) in 1980.
By now, Cesare had a family and his wife functioned as the restaurant’s hostess. But, since theirs was an especially stormy marriage, their noisy fights mid-evening not infrequently disrupted the tranquility of diners. They even closed the place for days on end when one or the other stormed off, vowing never to return. Despite this, Cesare and his restaurant gained a following, and especially during the fall truffle season, regulars drove from as far away as Germany and Switzerland for his spit-roasted kid, peaches and porcini mushrooms, tagliatelle in a sauce of cream with fresh truffle, and a steadily growing list of other simple but sublime signature dishes.
Part of the appeal of da Cesare, even today, comes from its location. This is not to say that Albaretto della Torre itself (pop. less than 100) or its immediate environs has much charm or any sights to speak of, but the town is very much in the heart of Northern Italy’s most remarkable gastronomic zone, the Langhe, a rural area southwest of Turin.
Unlike most destinations within Italy, the Langhe has no churches of any architectural distinction, boasts no grand country houses, offers neither masterpieces of sculpture nor painting, and has almost nothing in the way of opera, theater, or entertainment. But for most of its recent history, the Langhe has been a rustic Italian Eden where an almost perfect balance between wild and cultivated nature supplies its kitchens and tables.
Its vineyards produce Barolo and Barbaresco, long ranked among Europe’s most noble and celebrated reds (not to mention a dozen lesser but first rate wines— Dolchetto, Barbera, Arneis, Spumante, and Moscato among them, variously, red, white, dry, sweet, and the latter either sparkling or still). The white truffles of the area are regarded as the very best in the world, and wild mushrooms, berries, game birds, hare and boar thrive in local woodlands. Hazelnuts are cultivated on the hills above the vineyards, and unlike in Tuscany, small family farms have survived the encroachment of large-scale industrial farming.
Like Burgundy in France (with which the Langhe is often compared), the business of food and wine is more than just the means to a prosperous livelihood—it is essential to the area’s current identity. And chefs, winemakers and those involved in the truffle trade are local heroes whose affairs are known and discussed almost constantly by everyone.
Before the early 1970’s, Italian food and wine to the rest of the world meant a slice of pizza (quite as foreign to Piedmont as it is to Honolulu) or a cheap night out—of red check table clothes, smarmy waiters, breaded veal under slabs of Provolone cheese swimming in canned tomato sauce, and straw covered flasks of flat, utterly indifferent Chianti.
By contrast, France in the same period had a reputation for sophistication and a virtual monopoly on top-priced comestibles, and its missionaries in the United States—ranging from Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher to Frank Schoonmaker and Alexis Lichine—who could be so eloquent in their praise and promotion of Escoffier and his descendants, snobbishly dismissed all cooking and viticulture south of the alps as cheerful, pleasant peasant fare that might be hearty and satisfying in a crude way, but possessed of little real interest to the aspiring American gourmet.
Early dissenters like Elizabeth David (the author of Italian Food in 1954) and Waverley Root (whose history, The Food of Italy, came out in 1971) were few. But as the car designers and coach builders of Turin, fashion houses like Gucci in Florence and Valentino in Rome began to build flourishing, high-profile international businesses in the 1960s, and a worldwide mania for Italian design caught on, perhaps it was inevitable that food and wine would follow. That French prestige and prices would be the benchmark which the food and wine community would consciously strive to emulate.
****
My only real mistake the first night of my week with Cesare is to tell Cesare’s son Filippo that I am hungry. Preferring the theatrical potential of surprise to ordering from the menu, I cannot guess that four very substantial courses and dessert have been planned for me. Nor that dinner will be a four-hour event.
Tall, dark haired, good looking, and in his early twenties, Filippo is da Cesare’s maitre d’ and lone waiter. His quiet younger brother Oscar, who helps his father in the kitchen, is employed most afternoons making fresh pasta, while Elisa, the youngest, waitresses and writes up da Cesare’s menus in a neat girlish calligraphy. In sum, Da Cesare is very much a family business, obeying what amounts to a national imperative which still holds sway and determines the professional fates of most of Italy’s young. The restaurant staff usually also includes either a local teenage girl or (in spring and summer) a young Swede who’d been coming several years running. But, Cesare confides to me, the Swede is home this month because of some family trouble back home. Nonetheless, he says, she is “una brava ragazza.”
Watching Cesare in his kitchen, before dinner, his momentum is striking. Around seven, he functions with an andante moderato con brio, then shifts to a tempo of spirited allegro before dinner actually begins at eight, and then explodes into an all out, frenzied prestissimo that lasts until the final round of entrees, around nine-thirty or ten.
Wielding a heavy wood-handled knife, Cesare assumes something of the aspect of a badly out-numbered Samurai hero, as he quarters chickens and bones rabbit, and cuts racks of lamb or goat into wafer-thin chops. By now he has seven burners, two ovens, and a broiler going. When he’s not chopping vegetables, porcini and chanterelle mushrooms, fresh sage, rosemary and garlic, or distributing the result among the simmering pots, sizzling pans and old clay casseroles, he’s cleaning, or adding ladles of broth, butter, oil, vinegar, wine, and even orange juice to the various dishes in preparation. Sauces and bottles appear and return to shelves or refrigerator. The contents of fry pans are tossed and shaken. Occasionally, a momentary column of orange flame leaps upward.
Dishes are checked, fine adjustments are made, and finally, before the first guests are due to arrive, there is a brief calm pause for a change of clothes. Cesare dons freshly starched whites monogrammed with his name. Filippo appears in a jacket and tie, and Elisa wears a white blouse trimmed with lace and a black skirt.
Since I am technically the night’s first customer (of about twenty expected) a Post-it, headed “Giornalista,” is taped over the prep table by the door that leads into the dining room. Filippo shows me to my table, as his sister starts cutting bread and begins to ready the greens for the Insalata della Fattoria (farm salad), the first dish I’ll eat that night. We agree I should try a Barolo—a Ca’ Bosco special selection called “Maria di Brun” with a handsome sepia label featuring an old fashioned portrait of a woman.
Farm salad turns out to be a Cesare favorite. He mixes clover sized watercress with warm cubes of porcini, slivers of pan-roasted rabbit, guinea hen, turkey, and finely shaved Parmesan. The light dressing is Ligurian olive oil, salt, pepper and an unexpected dash of orange.
A remarkable Fritto Misto, as delicate as Japanese tempura, follows. It consists of cauliflower, yellow bell pepper, eggplant, apple, sausage, calves liver and a baby goat chop. The secret, Cesare tells me later, is a coating of béchamel sauce beneath the batter.
Then come Gnocchetti alla Bava, tiny gnocchi dumplings in a pale yellow sauce of Parmesan with a rich hint of sweetness. After this, I am served one of the most theatrically presented dishes to be encountered anywhere— Filetto alla Pietra (literally, “filet of the stone”). He takes a slice of veal nearly an inch and a half thick, so tender it can be cut with the edge of a fork, and tops it with a cool sauce of raw tomato and fresh basil. It arrives at the table smoking on a red hot slab of smooth stone. Charred sprigs of fresh rosemary beneath the veal add a subtle flavor.
As my Barolo has finally opened up, and the battle between noble fruit and harsh tannin has been resolved in favor of the former, the combination is, well, sublime. Finally, a little before midnight, I tackle peach and watermelon sorbet dusted with chocolate and crumbs of hazelnut, and waddle very slowly and carefully to my bed in a pension a few blocks distant.
*****
The next morning, Cesare decides to take me to the funeral of a local wine maker named Finnochio. It’s foggy in the hilltop village of Monforte d’Alba, and we join a ghostly procession of several hundred men, most involved in the local wine trade, walking up the village’s winding cobblestone main street toward the town church. In one yard, I see a black Labrador, wagging his tail while lying on his back, playing dead, unaware of the dark but appropriately poignant humor of the moment. Finocchio had been almost exactly Cesare’s age. No one says very much, except that Finocchio worked hard. Cesare mentions his two young children. In front of the church, I see an expensive new stroller with an elaborate sun visor covered with white and blue hearts. In it, an infant coos happily, rocking back and forth.
In the car, Neither of us mentions the funeral. Instead, Cesare and I speak about several famous Italian restaurateurs. But I have learned to read between the lines with him. “Good at business,” is his only comment about most of them. But what he means is that life needs to be about many things other than making money. I find myself asking Cesare about the Guide Michelin. His explanation boils down to his feeling, that after thirty years in kitchens, he only wants to cook for friends. A few new customers might wander in from time to time. But the accepted ideas of worldly success—wealth, fame, accolades from experts— have little appeal to him anymore. Michelin’s imprimatur had attracted people with the wrong frame of mind. With folded arms, they’d arrive to judge Cesare against their expectations. Or they were “snobs” who would brag later about their gourmet experience. In any case, Cesare said, what he really hoped for was to be less a restaurant than a gathering place for those who loved the Langhe and understood its wine and food. He hoped it would be a place where some latter-day Brillat-Savarin might ponder a new philosophy for eating, debating its merits over grappa late into the night.
On the way back, we stop to see an artist friend, and discuss, over espresso, Cesare’s current plan to turn the restaurant into a four-room inn that would be open, at most, six months a year. Cesare would serve only one meal a day, of his choosing.
******
Over the next four nights, I continue to sit in a corner of the kitchen, sipping Arneis, and watching Cesare at work, with sustained awe. I eat a steak seared with hot coals, baby goat slowly roasted over an open wood fire, fresh pasta with truffles, hare, a faultlessly grilled porcini mushroom, fresh green figs in a caramelized glaze, zabaglione made with the local Moscato d’Asti. I drink several bottles of Barolo. Before the week’s end, Cesare vociferously approves of my fondness for a wine traditionally regarded as difficult for foreigners to appreciate. He says I am a “gran barolista,” and that I remind him of an Italian army general who was a long-time regular.
One morning, Cesare and I drive to the French Alps and up several miles of narrow dirt roads to buy a sheep milk pecorino from a farmer. Another morning, we leave Alboretto del Torre an hour before sun up to visit an outdoor market where we spend an hour with the man who’d been selling Cesare mushrooms for the past dozen years.
On Cesare’s day off, we drive to the Riviera resort town of Portofino for lunch, stroll along the quays of the harbor, and enjoy aperitifs at several cafés. Finally, one evening, Cesare takes me to a big country dance in a giant tent. He tells me that at the turn of the century the Langhe was so poor that children were often given wine for nourishment. Some winters there was nothing else to give them.
On my last night, I sit alone on his porch, gazing at a black summer sky ablaze with stars and muse about the strangely delicate balance that has made the Langhe the current gastronomic pilgrimage destination it is. I decide that the question of whether Cesare is Italy’s best chef is, for me, largely beside the point. And however apposite they might be, in Paris or New York, I don’t think the Langhe will ever have much use for Attic Elegance, Roman Luxury or French subtlety. You like da Cesare out of love for Cesare, and perhaps because he knows better than most of us that, however difficult life may be, its realest pleasures are very simple.
Ristorante dei Cacciatori
12 Via Umberto, Albaretto della Torre; 39-0173/520-141
www.cesaregiaccone.com
Guy Lesser has written for Harper’s, the Economist, the New York Times, and the Herald Tribune among a score of other publications, on subjects ranging from food and wine to law and the arts. He is currently completing a year-long music project with Mike Rathke, Rob Wasserman, and a dozen other musicians associated with Lou Reed. He is confident, regardless of its critical reception, it will beneficially alter weather patterns in the northern hemisphere.
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