Can one blow of the pickaxe change a man's life? What Peppe Guida instilled twenty-five years ago in the oven of the started family rotisserie pizzeria in Vico Equense had the destructive effect of the bombs planted in recent days under what was left of the Morandi bridge in Genoa. A high potential bomb on the activity of him and his family that closed an important and sweaty chapter of his life. But from the rubble of that oven destroyed in a moment of exasperation the reconstruction of a new season of life for the chef from the Sorrento peninsula began, which led him to the conquest of a chef's hat of high lineage and a Michelin star.
An all uphill road, crowned with success, which Guida, 54 years old, an open face from classic physiognomy of the Neapolitan hinterland, implanted on a solid, well-placed body, two calm eyes that look at you slyly, calmly smiling, of few and measured words but very courteous in his manner, he has been able to build and level stone by stone, culinary stones carried and shouldered with sacrifice and humility . And above all with a character that, despite its obvious coy bonhomie, is that stubborn of a mule that knows how to go straight on its way indifferent to fatigue. A road that starts from afar and it's all a surprise.
And yes, because actually ours Guide everything is born except chef. It is true that his parents cooked from home for a living and a passion. Everyone knew them in the village. They were in great demand among relatives and friends, and were often also involved in banquets for ceremonies. Peppe sees them at work but is distracted: as a young man he thinks a lot about having fun, going around with friends. A temptation which is difficult to resist when born in Vico Equense, on the Sorrento coast, but which also stretches out on the side of the Amalfi coast, which embraces enchanting seas but also mountains such as the Lattari mountains smiling in the sun. In short, the temptations with a tourist season that runs from March to October-November were certainly not lacking.
Stoves don't appeal to him and for this reason the boy gets busy with small occasional jobs just to scrape together the money to indulge in some fun. Then everyone played five-a-side or gathered around a table in a bar to play cards. When it's evening and you feel hungry, it's the Guide who is asked, by… family expertise, to cook something. The boy is smart, even if cooking doesn't interest him, but he has seen his mother at work and has learned something. Over time, the group of friends disperses. One went to Bermuda and started a restaurant. In the meantime Peppe, again for the question of family competence, he enrolled in the Vico Equense hotel management school.
But studying bores him, and after two years he gives up everything. In memory of the beautiful evenings of the past, of those spaghetti cooked after the soccer match, the friend from Bermuda calls him from overseas. And he proposes to join him to give him a hand in a place that he has opened there. He can earn well. As Madama Butterfly would say, “partly as a joke and partly so as not to die”… Peppe leaves and goes out of boredom. She drives him the curiosity of a world that he does not know. He is 24 years old and has not yet decided what he will do when he grows up. One evening, just for fun – here we go again – the friend offers him, as in the old days, to put himself in the kitchen and cook a quick dish. Peppe doesn't have to repeat it twice.
“I cooked – he recalls with a mischievous smile – a plate of pasta and beans, with Mexican beans, and sautéed them in the pan, as we do here, the next day, when there is some left over'. It was a crazy success!”.
Borrowing a title from a film that made history in 1938 and won the Oscar, that evening “A star is born”. Not yet Michelin but let's say that a comet landed on that restaurant in Bermuda and convinced Peppe Guida that perhaps the time had come to start a culinary journey that would involve important choices for his life. But above all Peppe warned at that moment the strong call of his land and the nostalgia of its values, a much stronger appeal than the prospect of easy money in the Caribbean country.
Peppe decides at this point to return to Vico Equense. He hasn't studied, he's self-taught, but cooking is starting to feel like it's in his blood. He goes to gain experience in some restaurants in Vico, in Capri and above all in the Sirenuse in Positano, the five-star luxury hotel made entirely of hand-painted Vietri tiles embellished with collections of antique furniture and paintings Family Sersale, frequented by VIPs from all over the world, where he became passionate about the value of raw materials for the first time, of freshly caught fish, garden produce, meat that comes from the Lattari mountains. And it is Antonio De Luca, in his brief experience as Chef of the large hotel in Positano who directs him towards a quality and researched cuisine.
Peppe begins to devour cookbooks, studies cooking methods, reads specialized magazines. He feels like he's on hot coals. He wants to have an experience of his own. He decides to make a small space out of the old family farmhouse, a little outside Vico, where he opens a pizzeria-rotisserie. We are in 1994, with the determination that is supported by his mother Rosa, legendary preparer of handmade pasta that made the stomach languish just seeing them, Peppe organizes the premises as best as possible. He doesn't wallow in gold. He names it "Grandma Rose" a tribute to the mother who, having many grandchildren was always called grandmother, but also a indirect reference to the many little secrets of a strictly local cuisine that the women of here have been handing down from mother to daughter since time immemorial.
Its pizzas, very light, tasty, made of refined flours with very long leavening, as well as its croquettes, its grown pasta, the macaroni omelettes, the rice balls, the seaweed zeppolelle, attract customers from Vico and from outside, the name of his place goes from mouth to mouth, “There were always people crowding the stairs leading to the entrance – she still recalls today with satisfaction – But after a few years, this thing began to hold me tight. I had other ambitions.
His character always comes out again, the desire for experiences, to always challenge himself with new emotions. And therehe found emotions by discovering the story of Alain Prassard, the great French chef, first to win two Michelin stars at the age of just 26, which he then raised to three, always kept. Prassard's revolution? Having abandoned meat – and it takes courage in a country like France – it marries the plant world, bringing raw materials to the level of a mystical cult. This is why he buys land around which the strictly organic vegetables, fruit, spices and herbs come from which he uses for his restaurant. AND direct farmer, he gets his hands dirty and personally verifies the birth and development of the plant and he is a very rigorous Chef at the same time, he determines his menus on the trend not only of the seasons but also of the productive moment of his lands, strategically arranged so that he can stock up on his precious raw material all year round. In his case, more than Km0 we must speak of metro0.
Peppe Guida realizes that rotisserie can no longer be his way. But things are going well, his wife, mother Rosa, is struggling, they work a lot but they are happy with the progress of the place.
Guida thinks about it for a long time, then one day he decides that courage must be taken with both hands and with those two big hands that have baked so many pizzas grab a pickaxe and start demolishing the rotisserie oven. They think he's crazy: throwing everything away now that business is going well after so much suffering is not normal! The wife who has understood his impatience and the mother who knows him intimately gather around him, giving him courage. It is a difficult choice for them but they understand what is in the soul of the joint. Instead, the customers of "Nonna Rosa" do not understand. The new restaurant that Guida builds on the ruins of the old rotisserie, to realize his idea of quality catering, doesn't convince them, it leaves them cold. They were used to being in unpretentious familiar surroundings, like around an old-fashioned card table. Now they drop out.
Peppe holds on, and his mother Rosa and his wife Lella hold on, a real granite pillar of his life, capable of always keeping the situation in hand, of creating a positive and pleasant atmosphere with the customers while her husband is busy cooking , who disappeared early this year. And the faithful Eduardo Buonocore, maître, and the sommelier Gigi Casciello are also holding on. Guido looks with desolation at the new place in which he has invested his half-empty life, but does not give in to despair, he is convinced of what he has done and is sure that sooner or later his courageous choice will be rewarded.
"I wanted to change and I wanted to do it by cutting completely with what my cooking had been up to that moment. It was a shock to everyone. Even for those who were our regular customers. Many no longer came, the hall was no longer as full as before. They have been difficult years. But I wanted to grow, I wanted to make our culinary tradition known, I wanted to offer it in a lighter and more modern way. I started studying, I looked for the best producers in the area, I started selecting the raw material. I wanted my cuisine to be recognizable and not just one of many. Not everyone understood. But in hindsight I can say that it was a winning choice”.
He was absolutely right, local cuisine could free itself from the snares and snares of custom, as noble as you like, to enter a new dimension that was always respectful of the past but more ethereal, more brilliantly evocative, more emotional, made up of poor fish that he elevates to quarters of nobility such as the bonito, perch fish, anchovies, garfish, amberjack, cod.
Elsewhere they offered sea bass, sea bream, salmon, and he instead brings to the table the true flavors of that stretch of sea in which the Gulf of Naples is reflected. And she adds Mamma-Nonna Rosa's pastas, her home-made tomato preserves, piennolo tomatoes or corbarini tomatoes from the Lattari mountains, the cheeses of the Sorrento peninsula that bring with them their long dairy tradition, the roots, the leaves mushrooms, wild herbs, lemons, needless to say from Sorrento, and the oil that arrived in Sorrento with the Greeks and has always remained there, constantly improving its flavor and quality. In short, his cuisine is a triumph of ancient and modern flavors revisited and enhanced by his happy hand (and mind), it is a recovery cuisine, a cuisine of the memory of the bad times in which nothing was thrown away and flavors were brought out of the poorer matter, all brought to the lightness of a cloud. And all this does not go unnoticed.
in 2007 that comet that left South America at the time turns into a real star, the Michelin one that lights the spotlight of Italian and international fame on his Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa. Peppe enters the Italian culinary elite alongside Niko Romito, Paolo Lo Priore, Enrico Crippa.
And the first major commitments also arrive, such as the one with the Marina di Stabia Yacht Club, designed by architect Massimiliano Fuksas, inaugurated in 2010 in the tourist port of Castellammare. Public and private clients call him for lunches on important occasions.
Also born a important partnership with Giuseppe Di Martino, the great pasta industrialist from Gragnano, whose family has been making pasta since the early 1900s.
Di Martino used to looking far calls him for an ambitious project: make the quality of Gragnano pasta known to the world by "hiring" young chefs in this epic battle JRE, the international association that brings together highly talented young chefs and restaurateurs, who share a deep passion for food, for foods and their provenance, sustainability and innovation in the culinary field.
The format is called "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". A young European chef but also great Italian and international starred chefs are invited to Pastificio dei Campi, a niche company that produces high quality pasta in Gragnano, a precious creature of Giuseppe Di Martino, for a dinner limited to 10-12 people, all from the sector, where the guest chef prepares pasta dishes, with the most disparate shapes of the Pastificio dei Campi, using ingredients he brings from his country. Then the action passes to Peppe Guida, who cooks his pasta, in a confrontation-challenge, even if most of the time he loves to improvise with what is left over from the invited Chef.
It is the concept of recovery that the chef brings inside and that testifies to Guida's great inventiveness. And so in the kitchens of the Pastificio dei Campi a pact of love is consummated between European chefs and Italian dry pasta, a pact which is respected upon their return home since most of them then add at least one dish of pasta in your menu. "These are evenings that leave a big smile - comments Guida - they are evenings of exchange and growth for everyone, they are evenings that give great satisfaction, because these chefs come here thinking that pasta is a kind of decoration on the plate and they go away convinced that it is an ingredient to be valorised”.
Is there enough for him to be truly satisfied by now? Eh, never say never with Peppe Guida! Because while our happy to have achieved all the goals he set for himself, he still had another wish to fulfil, that of creating his own good retreat at Alain Prassard, a place to recreate the philosophy of his land, a microcosm of memories of family, passion for cooking, conviviality, love for the territory, where to live almost estranged from the rest of the world, feeling the pulse of the land and the marine and terrestrial heart of Naples.
And he did. It is a project born a few years ago which is slowly, better to say slyly, taking shape in Montechiaro, an unknown hamlet one and a half kilometers from Vico Equense and its “Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa”.
Here was born and is growing like a creature, year after year, "Villa Rosa di nonna Rosa" (ah that name that always returns as its roots!). Initially it was an old abandoned farmhouse with surrounding land with an amazing view of Monte Faito, on one side, and Naples, with its postcard sea and Vesuvius, on the other, which Guida used to supply his restaurant in Vico of garden products. It's not like Prassard's but that's okay. “At Villa Rosa we have a vegetable garden from which I get all the fruit and vegetables I use in the kitchen. We have the olive trees from which we produce an exceptional extra virgin olive oil. We have vineyards from which we produce our wine made with “Grape of Saturday”, Piedipalumbo, Aglianico and Sciascinoso”.
Then three lodgings were built (but in his heart he hopes to make 10 in total in the future). Three years ago, a kitchen was born that became the kingdom of his son Francesco who, with such a father, established himself as a pastry chef of the first magnitude. After the restoration was completed, the farmhouse was transformed into a B&B managed with competence and sympathy by his daughter Rossella. But where you can eat what the convent passes, or rather what the Guide decides day by day based on the garden and the season. The kitchen also becomes a theater kitchen for two very popular TV seasons of the Gambero Rosso Channel and, once the TV experience is over, it has been transformed into a dynamic space where Guida and his faithful sous chef often organize cooking lessons reserved for foreigners.
“Everything here, of course, is more relaxed than at the Antica Osteria. I love this place, I wanted it a lot and slowly it is turning into what I dreamed of: a place where I can continue to cultivate my love for cooking, remaining with my hands in the earth and my gaze towards the sea, another great passion of mine. And I see my future here, surrounded by my whole family: my children, Francesco and Rossella, my sisters, my collaborators, Luigi Casciello, Eduardo Buonocore, Florin Staicu, who with me, for better or for worse, have gone through these last 20-25 years”.
A long adventure, made up of ups and downs, sacrifices and great satisfactions, but what an extraordinary adventure!
