So, hi, I'm Massimo Buttura, I'm an Italian chef, I grew up under the kitchen table escaping
my older brothers at my grandmother's and cellar niece with flower where flower fell
on my feet.
This is where appetite begins for me.
Appetite is like anger but comes from a different place.
Anger is physical, appetite is emotional.
Appetite is the personal association we make with food.
In Italy, centuries of culinary tradition tells us who we are and what we should eat.
At Tozeria Francescana, we look at the world from under the table, from a critical point
of view, not a nostalgic one.
If we take our memories out of the past and bring them into the future, our tradition
can be improved, maybe even taste better.
Culture has become the genuine motivational force behind the evolution in our kitchen.
Culture breeds our awareness, awareness leads consciousness.
With consciousness comes responsibility.
Everything we think, see and learn gets squeezed into our cuisine.
Food is not only the quality of the ingredients but the quality of the ideas.
An Emilian appetite is round like a tortellino, so what goes around comes around.
This is Gino the Dominicis, he's a very important Italian artist and you're going to understand
what he's doing now at the end of the speech.
Let's move to, I don't know, I'm sorry, cornetto e cappuccino.
In the beginning cappuccino has been invented in Italy, not in the United States by Starbucks,
you know that.
Just to know, just to know.
In the beginning there was cappuccino and cornetto, the image is classic, Italian breakfast.
Cappuccino and here you have Iresto del Carlino, but in these days, Ferran, sorry Ferran, in
these days there are gazette dello sport.
So you know what we are talking about, tonight eh, tonight, tonight, tonight.
So the year of this dish was 1993, at Trattoria del Campazzo, we were serving cappuccino
emiliano, so it's like onion and potato with an extra old balsamic vinegar and savory
cornetto filled with mortadella.
So the transformation is a classic Italian breakfast to the essence of Emilia.
You see sweet, but you taste savory, you see Italian, but you taste Emilia.
This is where the seeds of our knowledge were planted.
The irony, the need to express territory, the pride in our traditions and the respect for
our local ingredients.
This was the beginning of all.
A very good collector of Gino de Domini, the artist you saw in the beginning, throwing
stones into the water.
The artist wanted the artist to make a portrait.
Gino didn't want to make this portrait.
As the collector continued to insist, Gino finally agreed to do it.
Invited the collector in his apartment in Rome and the collector sat for hours, this
is a real story eh, for hours, waiting for his portraits.
In the meantime Gino was eating breakfast, in bed, read the newspaper, get dressed,
make phone calls, finally the collector asked him, is my portrait finished?
So Gino then drew a small mark in the middle of the canvas and said, yes, your portrait
is finished.
When the collector looked at the canvas, he was very upset, he gets angry and Gino said,
but this is a portrait seen from 10 kilometers of distance.
That was the portrait.
It's a very important painting.
Culture breeds awareness.
And being around artists taught me to see things in a different way.
From this reflection, an idea was born in 1994, a monochrome dedicated to one ingredient
in the plate, Parmigiano Reggiano, and two time, slow, the time of reflection.
Through research about the slow aging process of Parmigiano Reggiano, I discovered the
evolution of these incredible ingredients, and I was able to give these ingredients an
abstract form.
Some of you remember Strisce la Notizia, no?
That was, is this Parmigiano Reggiano?
Do you believe this is Parmigiano Reggiano?
20 years later.
So I discovered this is evolution, and I was able to give these ingredients this abstract
form and recognize them.
So what I was thinking, I was thinking as Gino the Dominicis was doing, territorial
seen from 10 kilometers of distance.
You eat Emilia.
Faith and reason, tradition and technique, what do you believe, was the most revolutionary
man of all the time, Jesus who said all men are equal, or Tomaso da Quino who said that
faith was okay, but every man should also use reason, should also use his mind.
The time Tomaso da Quino, this is Professor Montanane, was introducing me to this argument.
In the 13th century, it was like 1270, boiling meat in water became the alternative to the
grilling meat over the flame.
It was a revolutionary idea.
She could get two in one, broth and meat, and for many centuries, northern of Italy, various
cut of meat plus vegetable and spices are still boiling.
Every million eats this at Christmas.
The first time my American wife came to Italy, she was kind of vegetarian, she was introducing
at the Christmas classic dinner, lunch, and she was asking me, are we really eating boiling
meat?
Are we living in the Middle Ages?
So for that reason, I gave Bolito Misto this shape, skyscraper of New York.
So it's like, it's dedicated to that moment.
One day, when we were thinking about that, at Osirio Francescana, we were asking ourselves,
with this beautiful piece of meat on the table, and all the guys that were there thinking
about that, do I boil meat because centuries of tradition are telling me that?
Are we so sure that tradition respect these ingredients and that morning, everything changed?
So we have stopped boiling the meat.
We cook them under sous vide, at low temperature.
We preserve the vitamin, protein, and organolectic parts.
The meat is alive.
So the meat is tender, full of flavor, and the most important is that each cut of the
meat has its own identity.
What is important is safeguarding tradition by bringing them into the future.
This is what I call tradition in evolution.
We have a beautiful bird in Emilia Romagna called Faraona.
It's so perfect, small, tender, almost, almost, almost in each house, roasted to death.
So roasting a bird like that gives you two choices, or a perfectly cooked breast, or
a perfectly cooked leg.
Like the boiled meat, this traditional dish must be cooked subversively, to give the priority
to the ingredients.
So the bird is deboned, the breast is cooked low temperature, the drumstick is licked,
the leg saute in a pan filled with all the interiors.
It's delicious, technically correct, but where is the emotional part of this dish?
So it's where you least expect it, in a scrape box, the skin, the interiors, the bones.
The skin is caramelized and became a crostino.
We make a white chocolate, garlic and rosemary spread, dark chocolate, liver, and white and
black raised the boundary between savory and sweet.
And on the top, a gelato of toasted bread.
This is one bite roasted hand sandwich.
Then we spray this intense perfume of roasted Faraona on the top.
So we are roasting the bones.
We chop them, crush them, distill them in a roto vapor, and so you have made this savory
and sweet crostino that smells like a roast made with the leftover.
The roast when your grandmother is opening the oven serving the bolito, serving after
the bolito, the roasted parts.
That's the perfect way to get emotion in your heart, because you are with your family, you
are with your people.
You share emotion.
You fight, but also after that you get in the family.
So this is the emotional part.
Connection to art is very important in Austria-Franciscana.
The art is on the wall, it's not there to decorate.
Although Austria-Franciscana, there is no view of the sea.
There is no beautiful landscape of mountain, this beautiful landscape of the city of Copenhagen
or of the canals and everything.
So what we have to do, art is our landscape of ideas.
It widen the horizon and open up possibilities.
One of my chefs asked me about a new painting on the left that I was hanging in the restaurant.
It's a landscape called train departs at dawn.
There are two trains going in different directions, like the way your mind works at 5am.
The chef traveled back from Milan, Modena to see the family, the image of the train
connect them to the past and is present with an ample full of ingredients.
We begin to create the plate, train the parts of dawn.
The recipes is an abstract landscape of cappuccino, cornetto, coffee, meringue, chocolate, crunchy
biscuit.
It reconciles the art reality of taking a train at 5am, leaving your family, coming
to Modena, working in our kitchen with the tender flavor of a cappuccino and brioche
that evoke warmness.
I always say, in my future, there's more future because I cannot stop thinking.
See that is why I love the metaphor of the train of departing, like my chef departing
one after the other, coming into their own day after day, making future out of everything
and squeeze so much life into one bite.
Again the art on the wall is not a decoration, but a way to read our kitchen, our method
and our madness.
In Elisa Sigiccialli's video, the part is over, the film runs backward.
So the fireworks, they don't explode, they implode.
The title is a reference to financial crisis in the world.
So I see the work of art as a metaphor of contemporary cuisine as well.
We are living in a storing moment in gastronomy.
These are not time for fireworks, but not again color food technique, or I think they
are not necessary right now.
We are searching for truth.
So reality in the world right now is very strange, but not right now, it's always been
like that.
So it's a stranger than a fiction, than you imagine.
Think about 21 days of heavy snow in Modena last year, not one day, or 25 days of earthquake.
Something that no one ever considered could be possible.
A contemporary chef tried to sublimate the product and put the quality of the product
first, interpreting what can be expressed through the ingredients.
This is an ethical process, very important, and which shifts light camera action from
chef, farmers, fishermen, cheese makers, all the people are close to us.
The time has come to put on the side our ego, and who are the real heroes?
The guys from the sea ocean, or the guys that are putting us in a position to create this
kind of emotionally dish with their products, or like...
The fireworks are over, everything has changed for the better.
Culture, this is for all the young, you know, Harir.
Culture, this is an eye-way installation, under a million sunflower seeds, each one
made by hand.
Culture is a motivational force behind change, awareness, consciousness, responsibility.
To quote the Chinese artist, art is a tool to set up questions, to create a basic structure
that can be open to possibilities.
Highwayway sunflower is a landscape of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds.
Each seed is unique, each seed is made by hand.
The sunflower seeds are made in a town of 1,000 kilometers from Beijing, which has been
making porcelain for the emperor for centuries.
This project saved a generation of artisans and thousands of years of culture.
The purpose of art is to make visible the invisible.
Consciousness leads responsibility.
As the artist, Highwayway said, I want the people who don't understand about art to understand
what I'm doing.
I think this message gets to the art of why we are here today, speaking about our passion,
our diverse appetites, for food and for life.
It all comes down to the need to share, to educate and be generous with our ideas and
our words.
I want people who don't understand about what I'm doing to understand what is the feeling
behind my plates.
Impossible is nothing.
Here's Gino the Dominicist.
Can we turn silks into squares?
In 69, Gino made a film called Turning Silks Into Squares.
In the film, he stands by the side of a calm lake and throws stones into the water.
Stone after stone, he watches and waits for the round ripples to turn into squares.
This is what we do in Austria, Francesca, in Modena, in Italy.
We throw stones every day into the water and wait for them to turn into squares.
This is what makes our work magical.
If you believe that Northeer cuisine could be the most influential cuisine in the world,
this is the circus that became squares, and what it did to Rene.
This is reality.
Impossible is nothing.
I believe that one stone, one sunflower, one train at a time, we will make ripples that
will become waves altogether here, a train that the parts have done is always on time.
Don't miss it.
Thank you.
Okay.
I prepared a little surprise as a video, that we thought a few months ago, and I wasn't
really, really thinking to show, but at the end, it's madness, mad food camp, it's like
we have to do it, prepare, prepare.
Take off your T-shirt.
So this video is dedicated, oh my God, all the Italian goes out, please, please, all
the Italian, please, out, out, because I'm going to go back, they're going to say I'm
crazy goat who does, who's killed everything.
You know what the math is.
So I'm dedicating this video, it's a short film, it's something that won the prize, a
critic prize at Nonantola Film Festival, to every grandmother, mother, housewife, who
is trying to still making tortellini daily for the family.
And so every family, as René was talking before, when I was throwing the pasta, I saw
the Faranbok, the beautiful stuffed meal, to me it was the worst meal ever, for you.
And the pig leg, 15 of August, 45 degrees, how was that?
Delicious.
Perfect.
So it's like every family has its own recipe for tortellini.
So more parmigiano, less parmigiano, I don't put prosciutto, I want more tagella, the parmigiano
is too old, it's like crazy things, you know, we fight every day about this.
So there are more discussions about tortellini in our family, in every million family, than
about politica, not more than soccer.
But you know that Italians are like 60 million people, are gastronomic critic, not chef.
Are gastronomic critic, so they come in your restaurant and they say, yes, these tortellini
are good, but mine are much better, or they're going to say like, oh, this is great, this
is great, but I would put some more, come on, come on.
So and the soccer team.
So they know exactly how to win the final of the European Championship.
