One can believe, or not, in the zodiac signs but what is certain is that of the scorpion, since was born on November 22, 1951, suits him perfectly. “Ruled by Pluto, a planet linked to the myth of the Underworld and symbolizing inner transformations, Scorpio is undoubtedly a reflective type who is not afraid to explore the depths of his own emotionality, which usually appears complex, gloomy and highly dramatic. It is a sign that takes life very, perhaps too seriously: for the Scorpionand there are no shades (if not 50 of gray) but it's all or nothing. Struggles to be light or have a sense of proportion: love and hate intensely, sometimes at close range because his love is so visceral that few are able to support it and it is easy for it to turn into hatred, in case of breakup of the relationship".
Who are we talking about? You will have understood it immediately, by Gianfranco Vissani, loved and hated master of contemporary Italian cuisine, born provocateur, arrogant, cheeky, irreverent towards everything and everyone, but also chameleonic, capable of taking one to the stars and crashing him the next day to the underworld (and vice versa), following one's mood, or super Ego if you prefer, in short, an iconoclast in the kitchen.
But when he doesn't participate in television broadcasts, when he isn't interviewed, when, according to him, he isn't provoked, when he doesn't jump on his nose (which happens quite often), in short, when he isn't in the spotlight and puts himself in put on your chef's hat and enter the kitchen of “Casa Vissani” on the shore of Lake Corbara in Baschi, a small ancient Umbrian medieval village that overlooks the flowing waters of the Tiber, things change a lot, and how. You enter a very different dimension, you enter a real temple of haute cuisine, where Vissani has reigned supreme for decades.
If one day, two thousand years from now, a display case from the time of gastronomy from the 80s/90s/2000s will open, three names will certainly emerge that will give a sign of which revolution took place in Italian cuisine in those years and how this revolution has influenced the future of our cuisine, helping to give it a world-famous reputation that has influenced gastronomic Made in Italy.
It will emerge in all its grandeur, the name of Gualtiero Marchesi, the undisputed master before whom everyone bows down, the chef who, introducing the principles of nouvelle cuisine in Italy, has brought a current of levity to our dishes, lightening preparations that had tiredly re-proposed over time, above all the chef who has given new meaning to food. The second will be to Angelo Paracucchi other innovator e one of the fathers of Italian creative cuisine, who with his “Locanda dell'Angelo” in Ameglia, designed by no less than Vico Magistretti, was among the first 7 restaurateurs and chefs in Italy to be awarded a Michelin star at the end of the 70s and who was the first professional of Italian cuisine to be invited to open a restaurant in France.
And third, with great honor, the name of will come up Gianfranco Vissani, the revolutionary, the Che Guevara of Italian cuisine, to use his definition, which with the force of a tsunami has upset the combinations and the use of raw materials on the stove, which has left generations of gourmets amazed by its explosive breaking charge.
That he was of a different kind, compared to his classmates at the Spoleto Professional Hotel Institute, which he entered at the age of 13 to obtain the qualification of assistant cook in 1967, everyone soon noticed. Vissani that already at school he made teachers and parents despair by his exuberance (“I was the leader of the band to the point that my mother tied me to the marble table when the professors told her I was too restless”), at the Professional Institute he looked over the hedge, he was impatient, he wanted to go beyond the cadenced rhythm of the lessons , try new things. For him, life is a constant race, which is why he became captain of the local football team as a young man. “My father Mario wanted me to become an engineer – he remembers with emotion – but I didn't like my studies and I chose the hotel management school, and I didn't disappoint him”. And alongside his father, a former piece worker who had opened a restaurant to which he had given the name of "The Godfather" in Civitella del Lago, Gianfranco took his first steps in the kitchen. Business is good, because 250, 300 covers are served. But the young man feels a 'sacred fire' within himself, numbers are not enough for him he wants quality, and he doesn't even wait to graduate head chef.
He leaves Civitella del Lago and starts traveling around Italy to get a thorough knowledge of local gastronomic traditions, products, materials, the thing that interests him most of all to the point of exasperation and, obviously, to gain experience. His debts of gratitude in this phase of growth are called, Renato Ramponi at the top of the Italian Federation of Cooks, chef at the Grand Hotel in Florence, You answer especially from the Excelsior in Rome Giovanni Gavina, historic Chef of the Excelsior in Venice, a man with gruff manners – once he punched him because he had eaten a dessert, the last one left, which a distinguished diner wanted to repeat – but of great humanity and strongly inclined to teach the boys who assisted him in the restaurant, to whom he never tired of repeating that cooking is a beautiful job but one of great sacrifice and attention. “Above all, a teacher of life – recalls Vissani today – because a person who knows how to convey sensitivity to flavors, also knows how to convey sensitivity to life”.
So it passes not only for the Excelsior in Venice but also for the Miramonti Majestic in Cortina d'Ampezzo, the Grand Hotel in Florence and Zi' Teresa in Naples. And abroad, he travels in Europe, especially in the USA, Australia, Thailand, Japan.
The experience that shapes him the most is the extraordinary one at Rex of Los Angeles, for Gianfranco it is equivalent to the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, he discovers an unexplored world, enters a new dimension of great cuisine, its preparation, its management.
In this way, with willpower, great dedication but above all a lot of curiosity, he builds two fundamental components of his cuisine that will represent the tracks on which his culinary locomotive will run throughout his life: on the one hand, the knowledge and practice of international cuisine and classic, on the other the freshness, the variety of flavors and the imagination of the various local cuisines.
In 1974 he returned to Civitella del Lago and assumed responsibility for the restaurant "Il Padrino" which would later become "Casa Vissani". and farmyard, among the lived flavors of grandmother and tradition. It's time to put into practice all the experiences she has devoured in Italy and around the world. And many certainties of the Italian culinary tradition begin to disappear. His Guevarian revolution begins. Incredible dishes, never seen before, and dared to start coming out of his kitchen, with combinations that surprise and flavors that fascinate. She is capable of inventing, for example, a ravioli stuffed with a veal shank, coffee and orange juice. Was it ever conceivable to unite such distant elements? Yet in Vissani's hands they transform into an exceptional organic harmony of flavours. His ability to know how to create a balance within his compositions between contrasting flavors immediately appears undoubted, to enhance the elements of the most genuine traditional cuisine by refining it through the international culture he has absorbed abroad, his dishes not only aim at harmony, color, flavor, aim to give pure emotions. And the raw material becomes a fundamental element for the conquest of absolute flavours. To flavor a meat dish cooked in a pan, it is capable of using a bottle of Domaine de la Tache, one of the most famous and celebrated wines in the world, a true legend, cultivated until the French Revolution by the monks of Saint Denis de Nuits which can cost from 200 to thousands of euros. The search for matter becomes an obsession for him. Bruno Barbieri who trained at his court recognizes him: "I owe him much more than Gualtiero Marchesi" and recalls that he was capable of waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, pick up the phone and call you: "let's go to Croatia because I want buy four cases of prawns”. This could have happened, as it did, at 4:00 in the morning. And he was off! In Civitella del lago the other restaurateurs even mocked him for his mania for fresh fish. Three times a week he runs off to the fish market in Rome and comes back with three or four boxes of wriggling fish, the likes of which he's never seen before. “He thinks he's by the sea – they tease him – and he hasn't understood that he's by the lake…”. But in the end, his choice is a winner. The pure, genuine material enters the kitchen through the main door, not through the pantries or refrigerators.
The greatest Italian gastronomic guides focus their attention on him, assigning him very high scores. In 1982 the "Guida d'Italia" of L'Espresso placed it in first place in the ranking of the best Italian restaurants of excellence and it has always remained at the top for twenty years now. In 1998 the first Michelin star arrives, in 1999 the Two stars. In 2012, the Gambero Rosso guide put Casa Vissani in first place in Italy. And it could go on for a long time.
By now it is universally consecrated in the empyrean of the greats of the kitchen. He will not get the three stars that many prophesied for him, but this will depend on his character not inclined to mediation and his little propensity for temperance.
However he is a world celebrity, he alternates trips abroad for conferences and gastronomy lessons with the activity of cook and writer of texts for the kitchen. The regional tradition in Vissani's cuisine (RAI ERI editions, 1998), The Great Cuisine of Gianfranco Vissani (L'Espresso publishing group, 1999), The Secrets of a great cook - (RAI ERI editions, 1999), Mezzanotte and side dishes – the great nocturnal binges, with the collaboration of G. Marzullo, (Rai Eri, 2000), Il Vissani (Edizioni RAI ERI, 2002) Gianfranco Vissani a Casa Tua (Mondadori, 2007) The Solitude of the First Courses – the great first courses dishes and great cooks in history (Mondadori, 2010).
At the same time, it invades all imaginable and possible television screens, participates in Unomattina (since 1997), Domenica In (since 2001), hosts Linea Verde in 2002, paired with Paolo Brosio. From 2008 to 2010 he was a judge in the program The test of the cook conducted by Elisa Isoardi, of which in the 2010-2011 season (conducted by Antonella Clerici) he takes care of the preview. From 22 January 2012 he leads I'll take you there with Michela Rocco on air, every Sunday, on LA7. In spring 2013 he joined the cast of Otherwise we get angry, a celebrity talent show on Rai 1 hosted by Milly Carlucci. In 2016 he was a guest in episode 15 of the Sky Uno cooking show MasterChef 5; he returns to be a weekly juror in the 2016-2017 season of La prova del fuoco. This is just to talk about TV, then there are radio and private broadcasters, columns in various newspapers, publications of handouts, masters and lessons around the world.
His name travels around the world and there are countless artists, actors, industrialists and politicians who pass through Civitella. Those who cannot go to Baschi call him to cook at home in Italy and abroad, fly to Reagan in the USA and to Khrushchev in the USSR.
Success, as often happens, changes people's character by making them more aware or goes to the head. In the case of Gianfranco Vissani neither the first nor the second transformation occurs. The big man, 190 tall and weighing 130 kilos, the former gang leader at school, bold and cheeky, remains true to himself in all respects.
If there is a colleague, even a famous one, who doesn't convince him, he doesn't send it to him. The last two bursts of machine guns were in the order for Alessandro Borghese, the chef host of a successful TV show. Speaking on the show “Come with me” hosted by Caterina Balivo, Vissani dismisses it with fiery words: “He enjoys doing TV, but being a chef is something else. He doesn't even have a restaurant." Even heavier went with Chef Rubio to Radiodue: “These half-noches, these people who come out, I don't care, I don't want to hear about (…). The more they interview him, the more he goes out of every pattern. He seems like someone like Corona, leave him alone“. But in the past, albeit in a much softer way, he also had some for Niko Romito, Mauro Uliassi and Massimo Bottura. Except change his mind, as he did recently and attest to his esteem for Carlo Cracco, Massimo Bottura and Filippo La Mantia.
And by the way, what do you think of your colleagues on TV? Him who splashed around on TV when today's famous chefs still had shorts on? Lapidary is the answer that sounds like an indictment for a proliferation of TV broadcasts that betray food and its importance to the full prerogative of a food-show: "These chefs who are always on TV don't even know how to cook pasta and beans. Take a step back before it's too late." By now his, against the spread of a kitchen that has become a fashion of surprise and excesses, is a denunciation without appeal: "In the kitchens - he complains in an interview - we work with scalpels, tweezers, foam, ice cream is made with nitrogen. We no longer know what a shin, a kid, a cheek should taste like. We have lost one of the five senses: taste. Everyone cooks them in a vacuum, at low temperatures, which is the worst crap in the world, they only serve to save meat, they kill flavors and textures, everything tastes like boiled meat”.
And in politics? Everyone knows his friendship with D'Alema since the time of the risotto with mushrooms made famous in the Vespa television studio in 1997 which consecrated him chef of the DS while another Chef, no less characterful than him, Antonello Colonna, became the right cook. But politics teaches us that one of the fundamental concepts is the saying "never say never". And here the brusque Vissani publicly admits in a recent TV broadcast, and without any hesitation, that in the last elections he voted for Salvini instead of for the left. Then we learn that he has agreed to organize the catering for the Brothers of Italy congress. A change of jacket? Hand! “I am a professional – he replies – and I go where my professionalism is asked”. "And by the way, I'm a fucking liberal."
And women, what about women? For a lifetime she has never hidden her great passion for the female gender, often accompanied by bold jokes, concupiscent looks, public appreciation for the opposite sex. In short, he has done nothing to hide that I am a fixed nail for him. But then what happens to you? Here it is recently go to Radio Radio and announce together with a rigorous weight loss diet that made him lose 36 kilos that women are no longer interested in him: «I take a step back, I take a sabbatical year – he said – I don't want them to break my eggs in my basket anymore, stay where they are, let themselves be covered by mold and ants but from now on I am no longer interested in women. We men can find many pleasant things to do without addressing the female sex. We can have fun even without a woman, with friends, at the table and so when you go to dinner what you pay for is what you consumed and you don't always have to pay for it. Women cost a lot. That's enough, I don't want to hear about women anymore.' And since when it gets underway it's difficult to stop it, here's another controversial statement against the female gender that has attracted him quite a few criticisms: "I had the courage to say that many times it's the girls who provoke the men" . In short, are we at the conversion towards a path of virtual holiness? Hmm, never say never…
His blunt Umbrian frankness stops at nothing. Easter is coming, a time for good souls and good intentions of peace and serenity. And Vissani drops bloody statements like a hammer on the killing of lambs in kitchen to serve at the table. “I take the smaller lambs because they are tastier” she declared on the Radio Uno programme, Un Giorno da Pecora. “I don't mind killing them, because my father killed them with his bare hands. And I killed them too. It's like chicken or rabbit. You must always use a small knife that can reach the heart to get as much blood out as possible, with a sharp blow, so that the meat remains white". As expected, a cataract opened criticisms and complaints. But Vissani doesn't seem shaken. Vegans accuse him and he replies “Vegans? How all those of all sects must be eliminated!”.
He fails to be diplomatic. Grouchy to the bone. Evidently aware of his greatness.
Casa Vissani, is today entrusted to the hands of son Luke, who drives it with great elegance, competence and a touch of kindness (the complete opposite of Gianfranco). He is certainly of good blood (he was admitted to the dining room by his grandfather in "The Godfather" from the age of 12) then he grew up in his father's restaurant until he became sole director. When he talks about him, the rough Vissani, he changes his appearance, becomes human, speaks of him with affectionà: "he is very good, competent, he moves well on social networks, I can say that he has many things that I lack, we integrate perfectly". But beyond his father's sentimentality, Luca, a Level III Professional Sommelier, did not struggle with his father's great schooling to obtain important awards as Best Maitre from Davide Paolini's Sole 24 Ore Restaurant Guide; as best Maitre with Paolo Marchi of Identità Golose in 2009; as Best Maitre with Enzo Vizzari's Espresso in 2011 and as Best Maitre with the Montresor Awards in 2011.
And here Vissani arrives when he is not traveling the world to offer you real jewels such as a chestnut soup with creamed chickpeas flavored with rosemary, seaweed, lobster and bruschetta in oil, or Puffed rice creamed with pears with grappa, osietra caviar and lemon cream, or a Veal kidney with raspberry onion jelly with caviar and orange sauce, or a Pink salt duck with tobacco sauce and potato and onion gratin, or a lobster with beer ash , aubergines with garlic, yellow pasta and potatoes lagane, or a duck croise with peas and scallops, ravioli with white prawns, broad beans, orange and chickpeas or a veal stick with aubergine and scallop parmesan.
Summits of emotional sensations that the Michelin Guide recognizes with these words: “In spaces of great elegance, the open kitchen created a few years ago becomes transparency and a sharing tool. But it is also the possibility offered to the customer to approach the art of transforming the raw material in all its forms and phases. The many decades of experience in haute gastronomy have allowed the Umbrian chef to perfectly oil the numerous and complex gears of his restaurant in order to guarantee an impeccable and seductive sensory experience for the eyes and the palate, but with a note of attention also for heart and soul. Great results are achieved through research, sacrifice and attention to detail”. A research that never stops in time. Why at Casa Vissani there are no classic dishes, its menus are always changing. The other chefs offer their classics on the menu. Not him, if you return after some time to Civitella del Lago you won't be able to allow yourself an encore, because research and matter will have combined in a new original preparation. “Paganini does not repeat”.
If one wonders in conclusion what the secret of his success is, perhaps it should be sought in the description of the sign of Scorpio that was said at the beginning. Only "a thoughtful type who is not afraid to explore the depths of his own emotionality, which usually presents itself as complex, dark and highly dramatic" could keep the scene for 40 years, as it happened. And that character of him so impossible is the result of his intransigence, in which – we always remember the horoscope – a dish "is all or nothing", no compromises, or half measures, or approximations are accepted. And we can also ask ourselves, referring to the display case of the time mentioned at the beginning: how many of those severe judges, who make so many young aspiring chefs cry, can we think we will still see in 10 or fifteen or twenty years, not on the crest of the media wave - because that is decided by the authors of the TV broadcasts - but on that of a cuisine of excellence that knows how to renew itself, find new balances, however bringing out the true, deep and fascinating flavors of nature, arriving at grasping and offering possible sensations and unimagined?
Appointment in the future to answer this question.
