There are only three museums in the world dedicated to Enrico Caruso the greatest tenor of all time, who died in Naples on August 2, 1921 in a room of the Hotel Vesuvio. The first is located in Brooklyn on East XNUMXth Street, it is a private museum founded by Evaristo Mancusi an Italian emigrant who made his fortune in America and who thus intended to celebrate the most famous Italian in the States, and who subsequently obtained recognition from the Department of New York State education. The second is housed in Villa Bellosguardo, in Lastra a Signa in the province of Florence, which the tenor bought to live there with the soprano Ada Giachetti with whom he had a long and tormented love story before she fled with the chauffeur, abandoning Caruso and children. The third and undoubtedly can be considered the most original is located in Sorrento in one of the most prestigious restaurants in the cItalian. To tell the truth, the museum and restaurant were born together by the work of 2 particular characters.
An official of the municipality, Dr. Guido D'Onofrio, amateur baritone, a great lover of opera who traveled the world in search of memorabilia of the great tenor who spent the last month of his life in Sorrento after being operated on for an infected pleurisy which led to his death. D'Onofrio in his travels in the footsteps of the great tenor had made friends with Enrico Caruso jr, son of Giachetti, who was writing the book "Enrico Caruso, my father and my family" to which he collaborated for research in Italy and to reconstruct the family register of the Carusos. Such a close relationship that Enrico Jr gave him numerous memorabilia from his father. The other is Paolo Esposito, restaurant entrepreneur, a man who considers - and rightly so - Sorrento a sort of living laboratory of an enchanted time that was, favorite place of the Grand Tour, loved by artists, rulers, political refugees, industrialists, musicians, poets and which for years has been fighting to preserve and safeguard the memory of the town and its artistic, cultural and environmental heritage.
A museum in a restaurant? Certainly a curious but highly effective idea. He also contributed indirectly to it Lucio Dalla who, housed in the suite of the Grand Hotel Victoria Excelsior, where the great tenor had lived a month before his death, was moved by hearing the story of an overwhelming passion that had struck the dying Caruso for a local girl who was studying singing, threw down in a single night the sketch of one of the most famous compositions of his repertoire "Caruso" imagining a love song stronger than the disease, capable of "dissolving the blood in the veins".
Dalla's message was important, to keep the figure of Caruso alive and not relegate it to the memories of the theaters. And so Esposito decided to name a restaurant in the city center after Caruso, 100 meters as the crow flies from the Hotel Victoria; D'Onofrio donated his important collection, over 1200 pieces with photos, autographed records, concert programs, autographed letters, scores, historical documents, above all the contract signed by Caruso with the Metropolitan in New York where he sang 960 times, caricatures and miscellaneous items. An exceptional heritage originally designed for a museum in Naples. But we know how things go with the Italian bureaucracy and in the end annoyed D'Onofrio kept the collection for himself until his meeting with Paolo Esposito. And Lucio Dalla? He was the guest of honor at the inauguration and rightfully cut the ribbon of the ceremony. That restaurant is now a living museum, in the sense that the story of Caruso can be seen, read and touched while eating, it is something current precisely because it is inserted in a dimension of everyday life. So current that it is included in the tourist information portals of the Sorrento peninsula for visitors and also for school groups.
We've talked about the restaurant up to now, but it's time to introduce the conductor – since we're on the subject – of Caruso's kitchens, the Chef Conrad Parisi. Sicilian DOC, from Ispica, we are in the full Baroque of the Val di Noto, he had just in time, as a child, to savor the genuineness of the ancient flavors of the countryside of the Iblei mountains, that his father took him to Germany to Titmoning where he had set up a restaurant that , in the homeland of pork shanks, herring, sauerkraut and potatoes, had introduced some fresh and tasty Sicilian cuisine. Corrado has lived in the kitchen with his parents since he was a child, he looks and likes it. One day they realize that he has a creative flair and at the age of 6 they make him decorate the dishes to be served on the table. Having established that this is what he likes, Corrado in his youth enrolls in a bakery and pastry course in Traunstein, and graduates.
But pastry making, which is his passion and will remain so for the rest of his life, is only the first step. From Titmoning he moves to Belgium where he completes the cycle studies in catering sciences at Jean Monnet, the European project to promote excellence in teaching and research in the field of European Union studies. AND' a passport that opens the doors to important international restaurants for him. From that moment on, the young Corrado seemed to no longer have a homeland (actually the Sicilian heart always beats but there is new experience to be had, there is to study, to scrutinize what is happening in the world of food) he moves frantically between Germany, France, Switzerland, the United States.
“I learned many languages – he says – wandering from one country to another, without having first learned the culture of that people. So I took pleasure in packing and unpacking: Miami, Ibiza, Paris and Lugano are just some of the cities where I learned to struggle in the kitchen.”.
By now sure of his stuff and strengthened by the experiences he had acquired, he returned to Italy, with an entirely Teutonic rigor of the working method in the kitchen, which he applied to the brigade and the raw material. For him, the work environment must function like a precision Swiss watch, delays or approximations are not allowed. He certainly works with his heart, but with mathematical precision. The owners of the prestigious Terme Manzi hotel in Ischia know something about this, a historic hotel that in the past hosted important personalities from politics and the economy, even in his time Giuseppe Garibaldi who went there to heal the aftermath of his war wounds. For the refined hotel restaurant, "Il Mosaico", orphaned by the great Nino di Costanzo, two Michelin stars, one of the most admired and respected masters of Neapolitan cuisine, who had decided to open his own restaurant, the property to Corrado Parisi with the ambition of being able to recapture at least one of the two stars that Di Costanzo was carrying with him.
Corrado arrives, takes possession of the kitchens, studies how to set up the kitchen of the restaurant frequented by Italian and international customers, inaugurates his management on Saturday. Which lasts a day, because on Sunday morning he packs up his bags and leaves. It takes a lot of courage (and a good character) to give up taking up the baton of a great chef like Nino Di Costanzo. But the Teutonic Parisi came into conflict with the ownership of the resources made available to him. The brigade that has to assist him is undersized compared to his needs, the raw materials are not what he wants. This causes a sensation, denials and counter-denials start but Parisi does not give up, he is not the type to compromise.
From Sorrento the sly Paul Esposito it goes ahead at this point. He had been looking for a high-ranking Chef for a high-ranking restaurant like Caruso for some time. And if with character, even better, because he wants to give his restaurant Caruso a new address. And so Parisi lands in Sorrento with very ambitious plans.
Al Caruso has found what he wanted and here he feels he can indulge as he pleases. The character likes to define himself "an extra soluble chef” in the sense that “melts as soon as you talk to him about cooking”. The kitchen touches his heart and in love the passions push you to unthinkable audacities. His father also told him, one of the recurring phrases was "in the kitchen as in love you have to abandon yourself". And Corrado didn't have to repeat it twice. “Since I was a child I loved spending my free time in the kitchen with dad, then working with him I helped him a lot with decorations and menu settings. Then when I started shaping my dreams, I realized that I had to leave dad's Trattoria to have creative experiences, look for new stimuli, above all to study, study, study".
At Jean Monnet, the young Parisi was able to apply science in the kitchen, he immediately fell in love with pastry, in a certain sense the most geometric of the culinary arts that well reflects his training and his character, but in his frenzy of growing up means getting to know everything that revolves around the kitchen, studies to be a pastry chef, a baker, a pizza chef, a baker, a cheesemaker and a butcher In short, there is no corner of the kitchen that he does not scrutinize to master the trade and above all the subjects with which he knows he must deal if he wants to succeed. Just as his wanderings around Europe and the United States lead him to master the different cooking methods that are essential to respect the material but also to elaborate it into new solutions. If you love classic cuisine – and how would the opposite be possible for someone born to the flavors of the Sicilian gastronomic tradition? – marries at the same time the innovative cuisine, who can give space to his creative flair, just as he creates unusual marriages between local ingredients and spices from other worlds.
His credo, he tells you over and over ad nauseam, is: “Food is the basic language of every society. I love re-reading the past of the housewives at the stove, meet the producers of the raw materials I use in the kitchen, listen to nature and its times, project my dishes into the future. This is why I break down and recompose my cuisine respecting Mediterranean tastes and aromas”. Which, translated into Caruso's reality, has become - just to stay on an operatic theme - like a brilliant Rossini symphony, with its crescendos, its sustained rhythms, its ironies, its sunny joys (it is no coincidence that the gourmet Rossini in Naples lived there, and well, between 1815 and 1822) a cuisine that reinvents itself day after day chasing the rhythm of seasonality, focusing on the search for basic flavors and combinations, on the rediscovery of new meanings of the material treated in a creative way , on the seduction of enveloping preparations that speak a new Mediterranean language, on the scents that Parisi dispenses you both from the dishes and from nebulised diffusers on the table that they skilfully create a cloud of aromatic emotion in the customer so that all the senses are involved in dishes that know how to skilfully combine flavors that sometimes appear to be conflicting in constant references to the ancient and the modern.
And all this translates into a Gambero Rosso Carpaccio, burrata cheese, lemon and licorice, or a fine creamed cod, grilled artichokes, pork rind popcorn and burnt spring onion, or even marinated anchovies, burrata cheese, escarole, powdered tangerine and dried cherry tomatoes. Among the first courses not to be overlooked are the fresh ricotta Morbidelli with green broad beans, prawns, mint and spring onion. Scrolling through the menu, one comes across a crunchy octopus, carrot and ginger cream, chard in oil and lemon and air with octopus water, or a superb seabed amberjack, creamy potatoes, cherry tomatoes, artichoke alla barbecue and oyster sauce. Moving on to meat dishes, here is an original Battuta of beef, candied lemon, caviar and egg yolk marinated in tomato water. Needless to mention sweets, his passion, because the Chef makes it a point of honour, depending on his mood, to constantly propose new ones.
And the Teutonic Parisi melts away when he accompanies his preparations to the table, with the love of a father who presents his children, the pride of his life, under the watchful and severe eye of Enrico Caruso (who, among other things, was a gourmand, he dabbled in cooking and was a devourer of spaghetti with tomato sauce) who looks at you from the walls and judges you.
Click here to read the secrets of his recipe Smoked amberjack and creamy saffron potatoes.
