Chef Vittorio Fusari passed away in Chiari, near his native Brescia, at the age of 66. Born in 1953 in Iseo, Fusari had been a pupil of Gualtieri Marchesi but in fact he had never really left his territory: the son of a railway worker, he had arrived at the most in Milan and for the rest of Torbiato and Iseo again, where he had taken the first star transforming the railway after-work club into the cult place of Franciacorta , the Le Maschere restaurant founded in 1987.
Among the dishes to remember, the potato and caviar puff pastry, which play on the perceptive contrasts of bitter and salty, hot and cold. Created in 89, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the original dish was a counter-current dish because it was made entirely of local raw materials, thus avoiding the use of smuggled caviar in use in that historical period. There was also theCabbage duck, with chestnut cream and duck liver pralines wrapped in anchovies and cabbage, a dish dedicated to the patron saint of Lake Iseo, San Vigilio. At the time when Iseo was a town of merchants, the chestnut was an important element of the local culture, which in this dish represents the shell that preserves the tradition.
In 1995 Fusari returned to his first love, the Il Volto tavern, with the ambition of merging the popular nature of the tavern with the experimentation of the Maschere cuisine. There Buffalo mozzarella with oysters and sea water was born in those years, on the beaches of Salerno: "I wanted to capture the taste of the kiss that the woman you love gives you after getting out of the water", poetically recounted the chef, who has always had a cultured and philosophical approach with Kitchen. The Black and whiteInstead, it was composed of an essence of orange foam on raw prawns and sour cream bound only with lemon juice as a thickener, with caviar on top. There was a different acidity from the lemon orange, but also a different sweetness from the creamy shrimp.
After Franciacorta, of which he has become an icon, Fusari did not miss the great stage in Milan, at Maida Mercuri's Pont de Ferr. “Cooking is the memory of sensations, not of the exact taste. In this sense, whether it is from the land or from the imagination, I consider her an extraordinary innovator of emotions”, is one of Vittorio Fusari's most famous phrases, which best represents him. It is said of him that it was practically impossible to see him away from the stove without a book in hand. “An extraordinary chef, but above all a cultured man, different, never banal. Thanks to him, I discovered what I wanted to do when I grew up. If up to that moment I had dispersed my energy into a thousand rivulets, this passion completely absorbed me”, Fusari said of Maestro Marchesi.
