Reckless, is the least of how you can define it. What do you expect from someone who receives a Michelin star at the age of thirty and is simultaneously awarded Best Young Michelin Chef of the Year? May he enjoy the success and continue on the road taken with calm and determined progressiveness in the L'Alchimia restaurant in Milan, which he arrived at just over a year ago driven by the desire to get involved for the first time as a chef, the first time he has designed a kitchen of his own.
But not if your name is Davide Puleio, a smiling and sunny Roman boy who, if he defines himself as an "extremely sensitive person, with the heart with whom you can discuss everything" at the same time specifies immediately afterwards that he is "a bit touchy (but I'm working on it), and also tenacious and stubborn for what interests me”. Stubborn is to say the least, audacious and reckless precisely make his character well.
Because the young Puleio, leaving the world of catering stunned, with a decision that leaves Proco astounded, entered into a divergent course with the property, decides in no time to leave everything, and return to his Rome.
Why, he will tell those who ask him for an explanation of such a sensational and audacious gesture for a boy of his age kissed, so young, by the Michelin-starred world «Something had broken for some time between me and the property. It was a decision that had been in the air since before the Michelin Guide presentation ceremony, the common vision had been lost and we couldn't go on».
And so Puleio with a leap into the void, which gave rise to a thousand assumptions, left the Milanese restaurant where he had won the coveted award and landed in Rome for a new challenge, a new bet. For just over a year in the historic center, in Via dei Calderari, on the edge of the ghetto, a few meters from the Tiber. in the street that takes its name from the disappeared church of "S.Maria de' Calderari", formerly called "in Cacabaris" or "Caccabaris", due to the presence in the area of the shops of manufacturers of copper basins and vases, in Latin "cacàbera ”, a young Roman entrepreneur, Marco Cilia, who converted from international high finance to the latest generation of hotels, has embarked on the enterprise of importing into the capital a concept of hospitality studied in large foreign capitals, centered on the formula of accessible luxury, both for hotel guests and for the services offered to the city.
Thus Chapter was born in a late 47th-century historic building set in the Regola district, XNUMX rooms with a view over the rooftops of Rome, a hotel that combines quality craftsmanship, design and urban art (entrusted, in the common areas, to the murals of Alice Pasquini), contemporary works of art, industrial inserts and original furnishing accessories, all managed by the South African designer Tristan Du Plessis (Studio A of Johannesburg), who has found modern art shops and galleries from among the alleys of the neighborhood to make the hotel dialogue with the city.
The bar on the street immediately returned to this concept and was entrusted to the imagination of Mario Farulla, a long-experienced barman, known to the Roman public who imposed his idea of mixing on the international scene.
Then there was the bet of a restaurant that deviated from the rules, that represented a new "chapter", it is appropriate to say, playing on the name of the Hotel, in Roman catering, with an attentive eye to tradition and culture international, to the classicism of the context and to modernity. Above all, a restaurant open to the outdoors, abroad and abroad, to build an innovative hospitality formula.
Davide Puleio, a Michelin star on the loose, was the right man at the right time, and Cilia captured him on the fly.
Puleio therefore returns to Rome, where he took his first steps after a long journey that gave him great satisfaction and that tempered him to the most avant-garde formulas of great international cuisine. A rapid career that has never known failures or pauses.
Perhaps it will be due to the decisive character that was formed as a young man in the Lazio countryside with his grandfather who accompanied him on his raids, Puleio recalls those days like this: "climbing trees and jumping over hay bales, not letting me miss anything including healthy recklessness" ), the young Davide moved to Rome at the age of 14, where his grandfather had a restaurant in Magliana. He can thus observe and study the path of vegetables and meats from the countryside, which he knows well, to the stove.
It is then the father, who sensed the boy's talents, still budding, to show him the path of cooking, which could have given him satisfaction, suggesting that he enroll in a hotel management school.
Davide Puleio thus enrolled at the Marco Gavio Apicio hotel school in Anzio. And he senses that something is maturing in him. "Suddenly I didn't feel the need to go out with my friends, I declined every invitation to go on vacation, I was much more interested in going to work in restaurants, savoring the tiredness and adrenaline". The sacred culinary fire flares up inside him.
And he has plenty of adrenaline to spare. He begins to take his first steps in the restaurants and trattorias on the Roman coast "between seafood salads and fries", then he begins to extend his experiences a little around Tuscany, Venice, until one day at the age of 21 his first big opportunity awaits him: “a chef I used to work with sent me to the Troiani convivio in Rome at Angelo's, a highly rated restaurant that made the history of Capitoline haute cuisine, that was my baptism, I understood that there was more beyond seafood salads or fries and I began to get curious. Two wonderful years with a close-knit group and with Angelo who taught me a lot".
Destiny is now sealed and for Davide Puleio, there are no more insurmountable obstacles to face. He needs to broaden his horizons, Italy is no longer enough for him.
He leaves for England and manages to join Agnar Sverrison's Texture brigade, where every day the great chef succeeds in the alchemy of combining and fusing, with great technical skill, seasonal British ingredients with Icelandic specialties, serving rustic dishes with Nordic flavors bringing out the textural contrast and clean and intense flavours.
This alone would be enough to acculturate the young Puleio to a world of high-class and superior cuisine. But for Puleius it is not enough. The Copenhagen phenomenon has exploded in the world of cooking, there is the mythical unapproachable and unreachable Noma. The name is a word made up of the two Danish terms “nordisk” and “mad”, ie Nordic and food.
The chef is the Danish with Albanian ancestry René Redzepi 47 years old prophet of a naturalistic philosophy in the kitchen, waiting lists on the order of months, prices around 500 euros, restaurant, to which the Michelin Guide has assigned two stars, judged for well four times the best restaurant in the world according to The World's 50 Best Restaurants ranking by Restaurant magazine, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014, while in 2013 it took second place, behind the Spanish restaurant El Celler de Can Roca .
A temple of cuisine that is awe-inspiring just to name it. But Puleio is not the type to hold back, and he manages to get a three-month internship in the royal kitchens of Redzepi. Three months are enough for him to learn everything he needs, he shows off for his workaholicism in the kitchen. The boy is smart and knows how to be appreciated to the point that without even having completed the internship he is offered a full-time job. A life insurance! Puleio stays there for just over a year, he acknowledges that it was "a fantastic experience that opened my mind, to date I have not yet met a place that equals it".
With that "healthy recklessness" as he says that characterized his youth L'irrequieto Puleio strongly feels the call of Italy where to build his career, he goes down to Milan where he spends a year in the kitchens of Luigi Taglienti, great school of Ezio Santin , a Michelin star at the Trussardi alla Scala which he will then repeat at the Lume in Milan, returns to Rome and goes to work at the Pipero al rex restaurant, another Michelin star.
Davide Puleio realizes that, at this point, the time has come to get involved in the first person. He returns to Milan to Alchimia, where the owners intend to make a leap in quality on the wave of success that has graced innovative Milanese cuisine in recent years. Puleio throws himself headlong into it and in a year and a half of hard work he wins the Michelin star.
What happened has never been fully known, Puleius diplomatically speaks of differences of views, the fact is that the marriage is in crisis. It cannot be healed.
Fearless and uncompromising, Puleio does not accept compromises and here he is throwing himself headlong into the Chapter adventure again, where he can give free expression to his desire for an unconventional, elegant cuisine, open to the new, without boundaries of genres and cultures, which aims to to surprise and not to upset, but attentive to the story, as it carefully observes the tradition and the essence of the primordial taste in which the content is the most important factor conveyed by the technique and the aesthetic sense.
And here are his Straccetti di peperone as beef, with rocket and parmesan, a vegetarian dish, provocative and of an extreme depth even if simple, where the role of the red pepper through long processes takes on the color and consistency of a strip of beef raw, recalling a classic of Italian cuisine.
Or the Rome–Milan Risotto that unites these two great metropolises in a single dish, simple, tasty, elegant and within the reach of all palates, in short, one of those solid dishes that every self-respecting restaurant must have. Or the saffron risotto with oxtail royale in the center that replaces the classic ossobuco.
For those who haven't done it yet, the countdown to climbing the Michelin-starred firmament has started with great determination.
