Antonio Chiodi Latini makes cuisine without meat or fish but does not like vegans and vegetarians, who in his Torinese restaurant do not find Linus covers of those who exclude animal proteins from his diet but then seek sensations in soy, in the tempeh, in seitan. “This is why I prefer to call my underground cuisine, a word that gives the meaning of the underground, but also of the movement”.
A restaurant for omnivores who want to enter the continuous movement of a man who, at 65, says he has not yet found his dimension. “I don’t know what they are today but I know what I will be tomorrow,” guarantees. And that in this dimension he found a new life after decades spent conventional cuisine in restaurants of all kinds, but always classic, technicians. Then the personal revolution. “In 2016 I made my last omnivorous dish,” he says. And it started a path of knowledge and approach to something completely different that is not yet finished.
It is difficult to explain what the cuisine of Latin nails is. Avant -garde? No. Experimental? Certainly yes. The cuisine of the future? Obvious. But we are far from essence. We can say what is certainly not. It is not a sustainable cuisine not because it is not but because the definition according to Latin nails is “reductionist”. It’s not a vegetable cuisine because “it’s a capestro word, Schumacher is a vegetable”. It is not a salad (“I don’t make them”) or tomato cuisine (“I use it only in summer and only for a dessert”). It is not an aesthetically beautiful cuisine (“Then if it is better, but I don’t care about the placions dishes”). It is not a moralistic or punitive cuisine (“those like me come from a male -giving diet associates the kitchen of vegetables with a diet, a prescription, to a penance”). But it is not even a female cuisine (“At the beginning I lost all my previous audience, then I certainly approached me first but now things are changing”).
What if we wanted to get out of the exclusion and to say what it is, instead? It is a cuisine that really seeks the shape and essence of the vegetable and for this uses two machines that show them at the entrance of the room, just in the showcase, what encourages curious looks (my certainly, before entering): one is a rotating evaporator, which separates and divides the solid and liquid part of each vegetable, a sort of distiller and which gives gastronomically valid results only with ingredients of a level, otherwise it is better to give up. The other is a cryoebus that breaks down the temperature of the product up to -38 ° creating a rushed, slightly gessive effect. Tools that transform the product, concentrate their identity and enhance its flavor and which, giving meaning to every part of the ingredient, also represent a sort of antidote to the climate change in which we are immersed.
And we come to my experience. The paper is divided into three proposals: 5 dishes at 60, 7 dishes at 70, or the possibility of having 9 courses to choose the chef at 90. I try a little bit of everything, but I remain particularly affected by some episodes: like the pastrinaca, a tuber whose Latin nails uses the peel to obtain a distillate to which he adds citric acid and salt obtaining a salamiiala while the “pulp” is ruined for 40 for 40 Days as if it were a salami: in the Lupine center, quince and a cold -squeezed pumpkin oil. As legitimate, however legitimate to use this word with ACL the pinzimonio, a succession of five different “meringues” made with the rotating evaporator and then the cryoexiccator (courgette and basil, yellow datterino tomato with saffron, peperonata, cannara onion with smoked wine and real mushroom and porcino) that must be dipped in four different oils from different Italian regions. Between a “panty” and the other you can resort to a spray with spontaneous herbs extraction that serves to clean up the mouth.
Then a plate of vilelot French red potato, whose astringent and bitter peel enhances the flavor of the tuber resting on the rumolaccio, with a caramel of bergamot with the tamari, an aged soybean sauce, lemon cage, pea germination and purple of thought. Conceptual but also “Street” the CrioEssiccato Jerusalem artichoke, with which to make the shoe in the word “underground” made with the leek of Cervere. And then the boots are worn to eat like a swamp, a small raw spinach with its smoked root in the navy oak, served in a cocotte above which, on the lid, there are pecan nuts, pine nuts and pistachios which, poured on the plate, are in charge of the right fatness. Probably my favorite dish.
After two other dishes based on a magnificent late radicchio with spring onion, and of Roveja, a wild pea that gives a really interesting chewing, here is a sort of predeassert, a bitter orange compote with saffron and what Latin nails calls “cold”, a sort of sorbet based on white melon and smoked wine of the Masseria La Baltiva and closure with a courageous CAPO With bitter chocolate with hazelnut and biscuits with self -produced margarine.
I ate on the table next to the counter that “borders” with the kitchen where Antonio and his work on sight, the dishes were brought almost all of me by the same chef, but the room staff seemed very alacre. The wine list, not endless but very well composed, is divided into dust (champagne and bubbles), stones (mineral labels), clods (material wines) and lands (territorial wines).
Antonio Chiodi Latini, via Antonio Bertola, 20/B, Turin. Tel. 0110260053, [email protected]. Open for lunch from Wednesday to Sunday and dinner from Tuesday to Sunday. Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays for lunch