1996 date that marks a beginning of story, a beginning of history signed Lucrezia, the depository of a diary of cooking and memory; in 2007 comes her son Giuseppe Gatto who as Chef wants to maintain and respect the territory, the past of the land of Calabria, and of Trebisacce, a town in the province of Cosenza, which dialogues with the sea and the land, and which hosts this cradle of taste.
Quality Calabrian products that are extolled both in the glasses and on the plates, natural products, the result of a philosophy of the territory, healthy, organic and wholesome, this was and is today Da Lucrezia restaurant.
Giuseppe respects it his land even in the cooking methods, where he wants to reflect the past, and wants to hymn the land, such as the cavatello made with the methods of our families, healthy and simple, that is, semolina and water, with murici, gastropod mollusks of ancient tradition fame, from the past of the Phoenicians and Romans who pushed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, as far as the Canary Islands, in order to procure the natural dye, being mollusks secreting a purplish substance from which royal purple is made, or even the Carbomarinara of grouper or cuttlefish in double cooking, and Sibari rice with cannoccio, a poor fish but unique in its taste and delicacy.
In his mother Lucrezia’s restaurant, born in 1952, who emigrated from Switzerland, Giuseppe today traces the family history, makes the restaurant a place to feel at home that dives into the sea, and let the Ionian sea speak with its delicacies but also with its past, a past of fishermen, good people who wait from the sea for answers, and who every day converse with its blue mantle. Answers that then find their proper rest and rightful place in the dishes of Giuseppe, a skilled sailor of the stove, and captain of the kitchen.
Giuseppe, after hotel school and university in Cosenza, became a sommelier, and at the age of 16 he joined his mother in running the Trebisacce restaurant, which from a simple pizzeria and then a take-away rotisserie has turned into a temple of good food, and above all of a past that wants to return, wants to tell and wants to be transmitted.
How? With Giuseppe’s mastery, mom Lucrezia’s past, his wife Antonella’s future, and his present made of recipes, stories, raw materials, ingredients and skilled hands, the same hands of the fishermen who harvested, and did not take away anything of the innards, of the caught products, and Giuseppe’s own hands that transform, and elaborate.
His preparations are extraordinary, both in the philological recovery of tradition, and in the contemporary reading he makes of it.
In his dishes, it is the catch of the Secca di Amendolara, the Ionian Sea, that is the star, then leaving the initial touch to his skill, and his wife, a skilled pastry chef, the final touch. A plunge into the past, a plunge into the present, a really heartfelt plunge because it is simply beautiful authentic, which makes one breathe in the sea air and makes one feel that belonging to ancient history, which then becomes today and which is not forgotten, because every wave whispers it to us, in every dish of the Chef, in every color, in every detail, in every single element. They are ingredients, which are exalted in their purity, and which become pieces of an infinite history just like the blue world of Trebisacce and the Da Lucrezia restaurant, a port of arrivals, returns, legends, stories, memory and future.
Restaurant da Lucrezia