Is the world’s obsession with Italy’s homey, old-school “nonna cuisine” keeping our palates stuck in the past? An Italian food expert stirs the pot
Is the world’s obsession with Italy’s homey, old-school “nonna cuisine” keeping our palates stuck in the past? An Italian food expert stirs the pot
By Laura Lazzaroni /
Illustrations by Eili-Kaija Kuusniemi /
September 17, 2024
You can’t mess with a grandmother. When I tell people the working title of my book The New Cucina Italiana was Kill the Nonna, smiles grow a bit tense. After I explain — it’s just a metaphor! a goofy joke! — I still sense their unease. Eventually they’re reassured, but only to a point. Some part of them suspects I bash grandmas for sport.
Nonna is an untouchable archetype, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Italy. Priestesses of innocence, comfort, and authenticity, they’re often pictured at the stove, deeply inhaling ragù fumes over epic days of pot stirring in the kitchen. Forget the fact that few of today’s nonne engage in those legendary cooking marathons we all imagine. We still insist that grandma knows best.
Alas, a similar misconception still conflates nonna’s old-school cooking with the entirety of Italian gastronomy. Die-hard fans have romanticized our cuisine so much they’ve infantilized it, reducing the national menu to a handful of hero dishes, with little interest for what’s happening in contemporary restaurants. As a result, the world’s most popular cuisine is a victim of its own success — stuck in a tradition-bound loop, forever associated with the stereotypical and recognizably delicious, with no permission to grow up.
What’s frustrating is that there’s so much brilliantly inventive food to be found in Italy right now. From north to south, chefs are rethinking the restaurant format, with particularly exciting results in the middle range, such as contemporary trattorie and Italian diners. (See Further Details below for more.) Their cooking retains the best lessons of tradition — the quest for a quintessentially Italian flavor, the quasi-religious cult of the ingredient — while looking around and ahead, with creativity and vision.
Consider the mind-blowing strozzapreti from L’Argine a Vencò, in Friuli, thick strands of handmade pasta which chef Antonia Klugmann glazes with an onion reduction spiked with cardamom and bay leaf. Or the take on tiramisu that the Montaruli brothers, a Pugliese duo of chef/foragers, serve at Cucina Villana Villa Fenicia: a voluptuous blanket of wild-mint-flavored cream encasing a tiny caramelized heirloom eggplant in lieu of the traditional coffee-soaked ladyfingers. These are dishes that are as ingenious as they are mouthwatering.
Yet across Italy, seasoned travelers — including many food writers — still check their sense of adventure at the restaurant door. When in Rome, they chase the holy trinity of cacio e pepe, carbonara, and amatriciana, never comprehending how narrow that experience might be. Living in Rome myself, I’m constantly asked by visiting friends and fellow journalists for pasta recs. While I’m happy to oblige, I also want to tell them there’s more to Roman cuisine than primi; more to Liguria than focaccia dunked in cappuccino; more to Sicily than arancini; more to Tuscany than pappa al pomodoro. Indeed, there’s more to Italy than its most visited regions. Abruzzo, Calabria, Friuli, and Le Marche all deserve to be celebrated for their own extraordinary foods, both old-school and otherwise.
Look, I don’t want people to stop eating lasagne and tortellini, but I’d love for them to acknowledge there’s a host of other, equally satisfying culinary moments to be savored in Italy
Of course this same predicament applies to other countries with immortalized cuisines, where the classic hits — from poulet rôti to pad Thai — still dominate the charts. But in Italy, that gap between stereotype and stature, ideal and reality feels more profound. To an Italian who’s devoted her life to food, it’s frustrating to behold.
“But what if I want to keep eating the same dishes because they make me feel good?” asked a friend (and former food magazine editor) not long ago.
Sure! There’s nothing wrong with that. With so much changing for the worse these days, we’re entitled to our little time capsules of forever reassuring, feel-good food — all the better if consumed under a pergola, and the Tuscan sun.
Besides, I’m not slagging nonna’s cooking per se. Where the cuisine of our grandmothers will forever reign supreme is in those locked-in-over-constant-repetition gestures, such as — you guessed it — pasta making. Many young chefs have honed those very same skills and made them their own, even taking them to the next level. But nonna is still the OG, and for that she deserves respect.
There’s something else nonna is gifted with as well: a sixth sense for flavor-matching that seems to me intrinsically Italian. When I was researching my book, countless chefs I spoke with credited their grandmothers for their ability to create associations of flavors and ingredients, ones that could only belong in the Italian culinary canon. Those things are imprinted on us through endless exposure to the cooking of our memory.
So I certainly don’t want people to stop eating lasagne and tortellini. But I’d love for food lovers and Italophiles to acknowledge the host of other, equally satisfying culinary moments to be savored in Italy, from down-home to fine dining. I live in an Italy where a fantastic trattoria can skip the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. Where a Michelin-starred restaurant can feel accessible and fun. Where we rhapsodize about fresh takes on risotto, or smack-your-thigh-delicious plant-based menus. And where — blasphemy! — ragùs are not cooked for 72 hours, because (a) that’s madness, and (b) it doesn’t do right by the ragù. Trust me on this. Overcooking and over-smothering in fat were common missteps of our grandmothers, who lacked some fundamental notions of nutritional chemistry. Nor could they rely on a full arsenal of modern kitchen gizmos and techniques. One of the great accomplishments of Italy’s next-gen chefs is producing equally robust flavors while keeping things light.
In my Italy, pasta grannies and pizza margherita coexist with Klugmann’s strozzapreti and the Montarulis’ tiramisu; with the Absolute onion broth with parmesan-filled pasta served at chef Niko Romito’s restaurant Reale, in Abruzzo; with the can’t-believe-it’s-not-beef carpaccio of watermelon and Lodigiano cheese that chef Diego Rossi playfully plates at Trippa, in Milan; with Peppe Guida’s spaghettino with lemon water and provolone del Monaco at Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa, a Sorrentine dream; and with Franco Pepe’s Margherita “Sbagliata” pizza, whose geometric toppings of basil and heirloom tomato reductions — added after the pie is baked — propelled it from the tiny Campania town of Caiazzo all the way to Chef’s Table.
We have to allow even our most treasured possessions to grow and evolve. I’m saying this as much for Italy-loving travelers as for my fellow Italians, who still engage in diatribes on the minutiae of our most beloved recipes. (Can you still call it amatriciana if you add garlic? Who cares, as long as it’s good!)
The history of Italian cuisine is a story of chance encounters, constant layering, and unexpected turns. Read Massimo Montanari, the towering Italian food historian, and his A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce. The habits of cooking pasta “al dente” and using olive oil everywhere were adopted more recently than you might think, and Italy’s most recognizable dish is in fact the product of non-Italian ingredients (dried pasta brought to Sicily by the Arabs; tomato from the Americas by the conquistadors). The moment a dish is born, it starts to evolve.
These days we all talk a good game about how “authentic experiences” are the real luxury, about how food is an entry point into a place’s culture, about how there’s no feeling like eating like a local. So I’ll make a simple request of all lovers of Italian cuisine: Walk the walk. Leave the clichés and expectations at home, and take a chance on a dish you’ve never tried or even thought of before. Chances are it will be delicious. This is Italy, after all. 
The most interesting restaurants in Italy play with the beloved format of the trattoria, rethinking its essence in different ways. Some have more of a grown-up, urban, even slightly irreverent approach, like Bologna’s Ahimè and Rome’s Retrobottega. Others are still deeply steeped in local tradition but with interesting twists, a fresh vibe, and an almost religious cult of the producer, like Consorzio (in Torino), Trippa and Ratanà (both in Milan), and Mazzo and Trecca (both in Rome).
In some cases it’s trattoria meets farm-to-table, much like at Ostreria Fratelli Pavesi and Cascina Lago Scuro (both near Piacenza), Antichi Sapori di Pietro Zito (in Puglia), and Erba Brusca (in Milan). Some restaurants seem to successfully bridge the gap between trattoria and fine dining, like Trattoria La Madia (near Brescia), Da Gorini (Emilia-Romagna), Il Giglio (Lucca), Venissa (Venice), and Trattoria da Lucio (Rimini).
Niko Romito, whose three-Michelin-starred Reale in Abruzzo is as legendary as his entrepreneurial vision, has managed to launch a brilliant take on the “Italian diner,” called ALT Stazione del Gusto; a deal signed with Eni will multiply the experiment to over 100 international locations. Reale is surely one of the fine-dining experiences most deserving to be tried more than once, together with Antonia Klugmann’s L’Argine a Vencò in Friuli.
Pizza would deserve a column all to itself, but let’s say that you can’t understand the evolution of Italian pizza until you’ve tried Franco Pepe’s at Pepe in Grani (in the town of Caiazzo, an hour from Naples).
Many of these chefs share exceptional technique, do impressive work on vegetables, invest in local agrifood productions, and play smartly with the drinks palette. Their personalities are distinct, but they share one main goal: delivering Italian flavors with punch and a sense of adventure.
—L.L.
Laura Lazzaroni is food writer, accomplished baker, and culinary consultant who has published six books on bread and food. She was the first Editor-in-Chief of the Italian edition of Food & Wine and served as the Features Director at L’Uomo Vogue and, for five years, as the New York correspondent for D di Repubblica.
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