Thursday, October 23, 2008

Restaurant in Milan


And today on with the "New"
A famous chef and restaurant owner in Milan, Gualtiero Marchesi, who reinvented cuisine in the 70's and who was the first Italian chef to receive three Michelin stars, has now reinvented the way of setting a table, even possibly changing our way of eating (properly?).

He is designing new cutlery and knives in particular.
Meat set: "Forks have only two prongs to avoid making too many holes in the meat and the knife is very sharp and has an unserrated edge to avoid tearing the fibres".
Spaghetti fork has four very long prongs (not like the Scandinavian three pronged ones, quite short, which are very fashionable but useless for pasta dishes).
Fish knife will not be a knife anymore, but an elongated spoon, because Gualtiero says you don't cut fish, you break the flesh by pressing with the blade and the curved edge will enable you to spoon up the sauce that fish usually comes with.

Process of nutrition and the world of design now go hand in hand.
Marchesi latest creation is the restaurant "Il Marchesino" near La Scala Opera house in Milan and the chairs are upholstered in "rosso Scala" the same red hue of La Scala interior decor.


Slow Food movement was created in Italy and the concept of "calmness" and "serenity" is a very Italian idea since the Rinascimento (Renaissance) perhaps never followed much in the Italian political arena.
But it is true that even centuries later Italians still like to sit at the table, enjoy conversation, savour the food and as Italians do all the time, while eating they talk... about food.
So we eat pasta while describing a risotto, we have fish and we talk about the eggplants we had for lunch yesterday, if we have zucchine (please note the proper spelling) we talk about fish!.

So... old or new? Tradition re-invented maybe.
Modern Classic

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I would love to have a set of Gualtiero Marchesi new cutlery. So practical. If you know when they are introduced to the market, please let us know. Great Post!

Unknown said...

Albarosa: Where can I see the movie: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine?

Brillante Interiors said...

Hi Patricia,
Thanks for your kind comments.
As you know I will be in Milan in December and I will find the scoop (of the spoon).

The movie was at the Vancouver Film Festival and it is a documentary on Louise Bourgeois, an icon in sculpture, now 97 years old, who reached international fame at the age of 71(!). Exhibitions of her work were recently at Pompidou Centre in Paris, Guggenheim in New York, Tate Modern in London to name just a few. The movie represented about 15 years of interviews about her life, her work, her vision.
Hopefully it will come again to Vancouver soon.

 
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