When you say the sign of destiny. Where could the impatient, restless, impatient Paolo Lopriore land, genius and recklessness of Italian cuisine, someone who has had going against the current in his blood since he was a child? One of the few able to unleash devoted admirers but also fierce detractors on social networks? In the Piazza della Libertà in Appiano Gentile, a small town in Como, where ours can indulge in cooking, affirming freedom from all the conventions, clichés, the gastronomic habits of many of his colleagues. In Appiano Lopriore, aged 45, he dropped anchor in January two years ago after a turbulent navigation that took him around the world, and here he opened the Il Portico restaurant where his creative freedom can find ample outlet . The training of Lopriore, from Como, so to speak, starts under the best auspices.
At a very young age he joined the small group of Golden Boys at the court of Gualtiero Marchesi where the future protagonists of Italian cuisine of excellence were trained, all starred needless to say: Carlo Cracco, Andrea Berton, Enrico Crippa, Davide Oldani, Daniel Canzian. Marchesi, another temper in the kitchen, the first Italian three Michelin stars but also the first to give them back sensationally so as not to submit to the "game of scores" because "at 80 the time to be judged as a student is over", he becomes very fond of that young, perceives its great qualities and great possibilities and also the desire to escape from the rules, first of all to escape the subjection of French gastronomic culture (“my cuisine is Italian and it is new”), of which Marchesi was the greatest philosopher in Italy, and introduces him to the secrets of haute cuisine. You don't mess around with Marchesi and Lopriore stays quiet and sharpens the tools of the trade. When you find yourself in front of “A life spent with carelessness and detachment from the present lived as a passage towards the avant-garde. A complex master of simplification, of balance dosed on the counterpoints of a tonal kitchen like painting. A concept that runs through all of Marquesan's work: a work played on two-tonality, chiaroscuro, cleanliness and transparency. A conceptual framework supported by an absolutely refined and completely rarefied technique, studied "on" every microscopic detail, tending to eliminate what can be eliminated" as Andrea Griffagnini wrote, defined in France as the best palate in the world, Veronelli's collaborator and right-hand man, one can only make his wrists tremble.
And for two years he was good at absorbing all the concepts of the Marquis philosophy, until he was called up for military service. After his military service, Lopriore flies over to the Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, but the call and fascination exerted on him by the master of masters is too strong and here he is again next to him in the restaurant of Erbusco in Franciacorta, a sanctuary for twenty years of international gastronomes. But you also have to look beyond the hedge and Lopriore takes courage in both hands crosses the Alps and goes to the prestigious Lodoyen on the Champs Elysees in Paris, three Michelin stars from which Robespierre, Napoleon, Degas and Manet have passed through history . But even here he soon considered the experience concluded and moved from Troisgros to Roanne near Lyon, a restaurant with three stars without interruption since 1998. But there is another experience to do and that is to go up to Novegia to study up close what it happens in Norwegian kitchens that attract a procession of chefs from all over Europe. He settles down at Bagatelle, a glorious restaurant in Oslo that is now closed. It's time to go back to Italy and put to good use the experiences accumulated over these long years of wandering from one restaurant to another to get to grips with Italian cuisine. We find it in the Canto of the Certosa di Maggiano, in Siena, where in the span of ten years he conquered the Michelin star but lost it shortly after because his innovations, his unconventionality, his desire to amaze by relying on the simplicity of the products make the strict inspectors of the Red Guide turn up their noses.
And so with a coup de theater from one day to the next, bolt from the blue, he informs customers and friends with an email that his restaurant is closing, because the accounts don't add up. At least that's the official explanation he's actually pursuing his own project. One more hit and run at the Grand Hotel Como, where he breathes the air of home again, then in Milan at the Tre Cristi. And finally we find it in the Como area in Appiano Gentile. A return to the origins, because here Paolo Lopriore wants his mother, Mamma Rosa, by his side, the same one who gave him the first rudiments that he has never forgotten. The first innovation of Il Portico inaugurated in 2016 is to create a place where everyone can see what is happening, even without entering the restaurant, in fact the kitchens overlook the square with large windows, everyone can see what is happening inside, there are no mysteries . These are the first steps of his "new restaurant concept", a philosophical-gastronomic concept of Italian conviviality. So here you have to feel at home, no more muffled and velvety atmospheres, diffused lights, menus that require knowledge of many languages and also advanced geographical knowledge to identify the areas of origin of the ingredients, waiters walking on stilts and customers in awe.
At the Portico there is a decidedly change of scenery, the catering concept that is applied here is absolutely engaging, it is a new ethic of being together convivially, no more actors on stage and audience in the stalls, here everything turns upside down, the actor-cook descends to the stalls and joins the audience, whoever enters the Portico creates his dish, chooses components which in their essentiality bring back to the truth (once again this word) of the raw materials, because "in the end the cook, customer and waiter must coincide and the room is one with the Kitchen". And so here the old saying "the dish is served" does not work, because compromises are banned at the Portico di Lopriore, there is no longer the cook who serves a dish on which he has transfused all his experience to amaze the customer, the if anything, the dish is “composed” everyone takes what they want from the counter, enriches it by indulging their own desire, here freedom becomes anarchy, the rule is simplicity, the categorical imperative is a taste built on the person with high-level cuisine in whose matter is exalted and not distorted, where you go to the heart of taste.
“The value of a chef – Lopriore likes to say – is when he manages to transform something into a process that had never been seen before. Let's think about Adrià”. And then at the Portico the cook becomes the friend who supports you and suggests in selecting the ingredients, the one who then transforms them into preparations that know how to amaze the customer in the discovery of sensations and tastes not tried before. Lopriore's restaurant concept it is essentially based on the search for inner values of a component, whether it's lake fish, a chub, a char, a burbot, whether it's beef, a fillet, or a lamb, whether it's offal to which a day is dedicated or whether it's vegetables. The game - so to speak, because we are at a higher conception of the art of cooking - lies in concentrating on the rigorously daily matter, respecting the law of what is found on the market, working on it with flair and imagination, studying its potential to give it a new meaning.
Here's the point: give new meanings. Lopriore rooted the conviction of this moral rule in himself when he read Scritti sull'arte by Piero Manzoni, the artist who died prematurely in the 60s, signatory of the manifesto La «Nuova Concezione Artistica» with Enrico Castellani, Nanni Balestrini and others, which three years before his death, causing a real earthquake in the dusty Italian artistic milieu, he created and put on sale 90 tin cans, numbered and signed, of “Merda d'artista”. It was a scandal of unprecedented proportions, it was exposed to public ludicrousness, there were parliamentary questions, Palma Bucarelli, the unforgettable superintendent of the National Gallery of Modern Art was literally lynched. Today some objects of that "scandal" are exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, and at the Guggenheim in New York, Manzoni's jars are sought after for hundreds of thousands of dollars by the world's major collectors. What had Manzoni wanted to mean with that choice that came like a punch in the stomach? That «The new artistic conception is essentially research, it stands outside any schematizable tendency: it arises from the multiple structure of modern life», and at the same time condemning those works that were awarded and considered works of art not for their intrinsic value, for the artist's ability or for what he aroused, but only for his notoriety.
As times go by, certain concepts remain. No wonder if the Michelin Guide describes Lopriore's restaurant today with spare words "Chef Lopriore returns to his native land with a new restaurant with an original format: if at lunch the choice is oriented towards unique dishes, in the evening there are "deconstructed" tasting menus, i.e. meat, fish or vegetables with original, as well as delicious, complements. A market cuisine where the local product is the undisputed protagonist”. A little bit for a bet on the future.
Portico restaurant
Via A.Volta 1
20070 Appiano Gentile (CO)
Telephone : 031931982
