“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are divided into nice and boring”: Oscar Wilde said it.
Stefano Marzetti, chef of the aristocratic Mirabelle restaurant on the terrace of the Hotel Splendide Royal, in Via di Porta Pinciana, a theater overlooking one of the most beautiful panoramas in the world, Rome which, from Villa Borghese, embraces D'Annunzio's Pincio, the Renaissance city and baroque, from Villa Medici to Trinità dei Monti, to the Michelangelo-style dome of San Pietro, undoubtedly belongs to the first category.
The man has an engaging sympathy, and when he speaks to you, he looks at you with shrewd eyes on a rugby player's tonnage, who aims to grasp your reactions in a friendly way, to understand how to push you to smile, a smile that then brings you to the table with his dishes.
Antonino Cannavacciuolo once said: ”At the table we meet, we chat, we relax, we laugh… sometimes we tease each other, but good food acts as a peacemaker. It is capable of restoring good humor even at the end of a tiring day”.
Well, sit down comfortably in the restaurant full of stuccos, crystals, curtains and fantastic stained glass windows that make you feel like you are flying over Rome, because this is Stefano Marzetti's philosophy.
His family tree has two branches, that of a sincere, immediate, ironic, sunny Roman spirit and that of a stubborn and stubborn mood, linked to tradition and to the territory.
Of the two branches, the one that resonates most with him is the memory and legacy of his mother Vittorina who worked as a cook in a restaurant near Piazza Vittorio, the largest in Rome, built with its 280-column arcades, as a residential area of luxury for the high ministerial nomenclature of the new kingdom, which was then transformed into the largest local market of the city, into a real area of commerce and populace.
In that Roman popular truthfulness, the young Stefano was educated by his father Mario who worked in building renovations and by his mother Vittorina, a cook as has been said, to the important values of life, to the jovial and convivial relationship with others, to the point that the young man dreamed , when I grow up, to be a firefighter to feel useful to society.
But then, as happens somewhat in these cases, when you have a person who is in the kitchen for a living, Marzetti soon discovered that he would have liked to follow the same path as his mother, above all on the strength of her teachings.
Forerunner was a plate of homemade gnocchi with a fragrant ragù cooked under the watchful eyes of mother Vittorina, a real success in the family that made him proud "That day will always remain in my heart and it is my timeless moment".
From mother's school the immediately following step is to the hotel management school of Tor Carbone, then to the Campus Etoile Academy in Tuscania in the province of Viterbo: a center of excellence dedicated to the training of new generations of Chefs and Pastry Chefs and during the five years of hotel school goes to Sardinia in the summer for working seasons at Forte Village and Cala Di Volpe.
From the start he is rooted in the belief that this was the right choice, he warns that he has not chosen to do a job but has followed a vocation that stimulates him to communicate with others, to follow the impulses of his jovial and companionable character. “After my first day of work – he recalls – I left the kitchen exhausted but with a giant smile that I still wear today every time I finish a service because I feel happy to do this wonderful job that allows me to communicate through food and give and emotions”.
The first time he puts himself to the test is at the Antico Arco restaurant in Rome on the Gianicolo, in front of the Garibaldi museum, a few steps from the fountain with one of the most beautiful views of Rome, the one immortalized at the beginning of Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, it almost seems like a premonition of the fate of today's future prestigious destination.
From the Antico Arco the young Stefano aims to refine his operational tools and his culinary culture and we find him first with Moreno Picchietti, the Chef who left from the Maremma who led the restaurants of important hotels around the world and then landed at the Hotel Royal di Sanremo, then passes with Fabrizio Cadei today executive chef of the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan a master with a solid baggage of experience gained at Jean-Paul Lacombe's Leon de Lyon Restaurant (two Michelin stars), at London's Hyde Park and that the Hotel Eden in Rome obtained the Michelin star as “Best hotel restaurant in Italy” and we also find it in the kitchens of the Pergola of the three-starred Heinz Beck. Stefano Marzetti is now a chef who is being talked about who has been able to put the experience gained up to that moment to good use.
Thus we come to the highlight of his career. In Rome, an important hotel entrepreneur Roberto Naldi, owner of the prestigious Parco dei Principi, the Splendid Royal in Lugano, the Splendid Royal in Paris, took over a Maronite convent a stone's throw from Via Veneto, we are at the beginning of 2000 to make it a hotel luxury. The renovations are impressive, Naldi relies on the Papiri studio to create a sumptuous style hotel, all Baroque stuccos, crystal chandeliers, boiseries, curtains, tapestries, antique furniture: the inspiration is that of the great palaces of the ancient Roman nobility which are just a stone's throw away, the Hotel aims at a high-level international clientele, especially American and Russian, who come to Rome to relive the splendor of the Dolce Vita and who are looking for a stay of luxury and elegance
The flagship of the company is the extraordinary restaurant on the top floor, the Mirabelle, where class and elegance are combined with an almost obsessive attention to hospitality, where the customer is not a number but always the number one in terms of attention and so it must be felt. The imprinting was entrusted to the legendary Bruno Borghesi, the former owner of Sans Soucì, the restaurant where important pages were written at the time of the Dolce Vita, frequented by Fred Bongusto and Mina, Lollobrigida, Loren, Bergman and Rossellini, exponents of the Italian and international political world such as Fanfani, Leone, Saragat, Cossiga and Ronald Reagan where international stars such as Frank Sinatra, Charles Aznavour, Juliette Grecò, Josephine Baker performed. From his authoritative history, Borghesi dictates the rules of a philosophy of hospitality that must distinguish Mirabelle from other restaurants of more ancient tradition, which never leaves anything to chance and knows how to relate to the infinite psychological angles of an international clientele.
If Borghesi organizes the dining room, Giuseppe Sestito is called in the kitchen, the late chef who loved the Mediterranean, capable of making even simple things extraordinary, of combining luxury and poor elements of tradition, lobsters and anchovies. As is the case with his legendary steamed lobster with panzanella and tomato and basil coulis a suggestive contrast between the humility of panzanella, a poor dish of peasant culture and the shellfish symbol of luxury cuisine.
It was Sestito who called himself Stefano Marzetti at the Mirabelle, he wanted him by his side, having heard about him around, in this enterprise that started from nothing and which in six years immediately won a Michelin star.
And when Sestito decided to leave for the North to embark on a new adventure, Executive Chef of Il Re della Busa and Tremani, the Lido Palace restaurants in Riva del Garda, Marzetti inherited his scepter just as the restaurant manager Luca Costanzi took on his shoulders the difficult and demanding legacy of a prince of hospitality like Bruno Bourgeois.
In that wake, the Mirabelle has established itself as a real war machine, one of the few hotel restaurants that attracts non-residential Italian and international customers, from George Clooney to Tom Cruise, from Meryl Streep to the former US president, Bill Clinton to Xi Jinping, president of the People's Republic Chinese, from the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, to Sting, to Antonio Banderas, Sophia Loren.
But if you ask Marzetti which was the guest who most excited him, the Chef replies with a diplomatic wink: “My emotion is that of seeing the smile of a guest in front of a dish. This is the best reward because here it is important to create that atmosphere of great complicity between cuisine, environment, comfort, panorama: elements that represent the distinctive feature of our way of catering".
A restaurant that responds to a precise gastronomic philosophy of the chef: a creative cuisine with a Mediterranean imprint, which combines the flavors of tradition, innovation and experimentation. “My language – he says – is based on the transparency and genuineness of the raw materials” which Marzetti personally selects with obsessive attention from excellent local producers. The word that occurs most in his language is "simplicity". A real contradiction in terms between its literal meaning and the culinary one which vice versa requires great skill, culture and application. “My recipes are the result of my continuous research and experience; mine is a "visceral" cuisine that comes from my great passion that draws on tradition to convert towards new techniques and contaminations that must surprise me before the customer by making emotions and sensations that envelop you resurface in the care of the nuances and in the traceability of the raw material ”.
"Visceral" an expression that you hardly find in the profile of a Chef but it is not so for Stefano Marzetti because if for the Treccani Dictionary it means "Profound and instinctive", then he with his immediacy, his naturalness, his spontaneity is up to deep down and you feel it in his cooking when his instinct marries technique and innovation as in the "Carbonara in a risotto" which encloses an icon of the Roman gastronomic tradition inside a sheet of pasta, creating an out-of-the-ordinary combination with truffles and Jerusalem artichoke as well as guanciale, pecorino cheese and egg all combined with a risotto with asparagus and egg zabaglione. Or the "Tuna my way", a modern reinterpretation with a Bloody Mary sorbet, or the "Pomo_d'oro" which represents the made in Italy in which the Chef has created a tomato gel that coats a buffalo bavarois accompanied with a savory biscuit with basil and a caviar of Evo oil and gold leaves that recall the wording. Three proposals that objectively inspire emotion
And it is no coincidence that "visceral" is also used by the director Luca Costanzi in the presentation of the restaurant on the web: "It is the elegance of discretion, it is the attention to detail, it is the scene where my fantastic team and I express ourselves like an orchestra that always plays the right music based on each score, with a visceral love for this work”.
Above all, it is the great lesson of Sestito and Borghesi that is renewed and enriched over time.
