In friendship groups that are formed in youth, there is always the driving element, the one that has the most ease of language, who always has a ready joke, who knows how to aggregate his companions, who knows how to instill joy in the group. Fabrizio Sepe, pure Trastevere, with a father who worked in a hardware store in via Cavour and his mother a housewife, like all Trasteveres, lived a lot in the square in his neighborhood, where his company met. But he, the young Fabrizio, in addition to being the "point" of the group, had one more point to attract all his friends: he literally took them by the throat. And between a game at Commodore 64 and one at Subbuteo, in moments of rest he organized some finger food with what he found in the fridge at home. Far from overcooked spaghetti with oil and chilli pepper, he was already inclined towards lunches and snacks with a touch of novelty that were much appreciated by his friends.
This innate sympathy of his, that story-telling and engaging ability with which he aggregated the group of friends as a boy, came in handy years later, when, now established as a cook, he was called on television in successful programs. Fabrizio is someone who exudes sympathy and, as they say in the jargon, holes the video. We therefore find it a 'Sky on the table', a Alice house, alongside Franca Rizzi. , to Your own business and subsequently with the column Neither meat nor fish within the programme God makes them and then couples them, conducted by Licia Colò on TV 2000. And still at theTest of the cook' on Rai1 with Antonella Clerici, al Tv8 program by Alessandro Borghese 'Cuochi d'Italia', where he ranks second, in the 'Prova del fuoco', Elisa Isoardi version. Her cooking is a continuous exploration of tradition, never banal. Because Fabrizio is one of those who haven't discovered cooking due to external events, no! Cooking had been in his blood since he was a child, so to speak, it came spontaneously to him just as it came spontaneously to comment or criticize the dishes that his mother prepared for the family. He tasted and made judgments while his mother was cooking, and most of the time he was right. A sort of enfant prodige. That's why he had clear ideas ever since: I'll be a cook when I grow up, he repeated in the family. That is, more than the cook, the chef de cuisine. And here's why. Because, although Italian, her mother had lived in Paris since she was 6 months old. So French was spoken in the family and in French culture being a cook, in the country that taught the world haute cuisine, has always been a respectable profession. Not so in Italy at least in those days, the media food bubble had not yet exploded. Fabrizio, who begins to attend the hotel management school because of his passion, feels in difficulty with the girls who ask him what school he attended. “I answered – he recalls today with a sly smile – that I was a hotel business technician, I didn't tell them that I was studying to be a cook, because it meant I didn't want to study and fall back on a simpler path, and this made me lose appeal on girls compared to my classmates who were studying to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer…”.
But Fabrizio was well aware that that and only that would be his destiny. To tell the truth, his mother's French experiences had a considerable weight in the cultural and culinary formation of the young Fabrizio. He himself remembers it "I certainly took my first steps in the kitchen in the family in the preparation of dinners for birthdays or important holidays such as Christmas or New Year's at home". The table was a ritual and the food demanded respect, as his mother always said. “At home I never saw mine setting the table with plastic plates but above all my mother cared about the mise en place: glass glasses and steel cutlery were a must, an aperitif paired with a Cremant d' Alsace could not be missing . Surely it was she who made me passionate about this fantastic world of catering".
Graduated from the hotel institute, Fabrizio roams around Italy and abroad following his instinct and above all his hunger for quality cuisine pushes him to follow different paths, the Polo Club, the exclusive Chess Club, the of clay pigeon shooting and hunting - but his first real experience, the one that shaped him concretely, came in 1993 when he was accepted in the kitchens of the Alberto Ciarla restaurant a high-sounding name for Roman catering at the time, known worldwide (Forbes put it among the 10 most expensive restaurants in the world and Frommer's among the best 5). But his desire to make new experiences drives to Zurich to be a chef at an Italian restaurant, also registers a small passage to Hong Kong, but it's not air for him, so he returns to Italy and goes to work for two years at the Il re di Macchia restaurant in Montalcino and then returns to Rome where he becomes chef at the Al Ponte della ranocchia restaurant, from here he moves on to the restaurant The Tamerici at the Trevi Fountain and finally on 13 January 2006 he was able to crown his dream together with two middle school friends and opened the restaurant The Three Pumpkins. A hard experience at the beginning, the friends can't handle the burdensome commitment, and after two years they prefer to take different paths, and he remains firm on the deck of the ship. “After much wandering, I realized that I had really become a chef when I opened the restaurant, now there's no turning back. I had all the responsibility on my shoulders, I wanted to establish myself as head chef". And he succeeds in full, his Tre Zucche makes its way among the restaurants of the capital and conquers a respectable position. “A staple of the neighborhood but also of the whole city – defines it in the Gambero Rosso Guide – Fabrizio Sepe's restaurant has been in the breach for many years…”. “A place that is an example to point out - writes Identità Golose - for a certain restaurant with medium-heavy ambitions, which is the one we suffer the most in Italy due to the lack of restraint and certainly conscious wishful thinking: I would like to but I don't want to. And it is instead where the most important championship is played, because in the end everyone is good at being artists". And the authoritative Bibenda confirms that “Fabrizio Sepe's restaurant has won the esteem and affection of many gourmets”.
His cuisine is a paean to Roman and Lazio gastronomic traditions, to whose products he has dedicated a room next to the restaurant: the "bottega", a cross-section of the territory that condenses the old tavern, the grocery store and the bakery. Hence the purchases and a cuisine from... a shop indeed, over there, beyond the part a more refined cuisine where to give inspiration to his fantasies and his creations revisiting with "esprit de finesse", to quote the mother, the traditional cuisine , and where – people don't know it – the mother's French teachings are extremely present and felt.
“My cuisine – explains Fabrizio Sepe – is closely linked to my region, currently I offer a menu with a traditional proposal, and the other one with my interpretation. I made this change in January 2018, after I had participated in a television program by Alessandro Borghese on channel 8, where I was the chef of Lazio, and I had to present lesser-known dishes. The idea of traditional Roman regional cuisine, linked only to offal, heavy and fat, needs to be reviewed. There are many poor recipes, which are part of our history and our culture, to be discovered and re-proposed which, if updated to date, are very interesting".
It is the battleground – as the readers of First&Food have been able to learn, of many starred chefs, a battle that leads to the rediscovery of the scents and flavors of the fields and marshals fierce armies against the front of many Roman trattorias for tourists, where the quality is a question mark and where the gastronomic cultural value of the area is constantly offended. In this the Three Pumpkins by Fabrizio Sepe has been doing a meritorious work for years, a real laboratory of ideas and first-line taste in search of lost time to be presented with great elegance and inventiveness.
In short, Fabrizio Sepe today is an arrival who does not betray his origins and who knows how to combine humility and professionalism: "I must say that today I have achieved everything I set out to do, indeed more, I have a splendid wife who helps me at the Bottega, and carries on the business with the same passion as me, I have a 16 year old son who is doing the third year of hotel management school as a cook, I hope he will continue in order to be able to carry on the Three Pumpkins and then I have my daughter Sofia who still doesn't know!" .
The ex-boyfriend from Trastevere, now almost fifty years old, has managed to successfully carry on his youthful passion, an elegant local cuisine with an esprit de finesse
