Some years ago Antonio Carluccio gave an interview in which he marvelled at how much his native cuisine had changed in his lifetime. He ascribed this phenomenon to a name much less familiar to Anglo-Saxons than his, but one whose influence arguably should make it as recognisable as Armani or Gucci: Gualtiero Marchesi.
Marchesi was the originator of what he called nuova cucina italiana, the Italian version of nouvelle cuisine. Its creation in the 1970s led to an era of new sophistication in the nation’s food and made him its most venerated chef. He reimagined the Italian cookbook, taking inspiration from painting, music and the landscape. “Italian cuisine was essentially domestic cooking . . . too vulgar, too common,” he held. “Traditionally, in Italy we tried to do too much with food in the cooking of it, and not enough in the presentation.”
Critics raved at dishes such as blobs of fish and tomato arranged as an action painting, or Quattro Pasta, which paid homage to Andy Warhol’s characteristic prints. In 1985, within seven years of opening his restaurant in Milan, Marchesi became the first Italian chef — he preferred “cook” — outside France to be awarded three Michelin stars. In turn, he influenced a generation of youngsters, keen to experiment further — heretically, Marchesi, who had made his name with spaghetti salad, took pasta off his menu in 1983 — but not all were happy at the rise of haute cuisine: Carluccio (obituary, November 8, 2017) for one lamented the decline of the influence of the family-run trattoria.
An avid collector of quotations, which he kept on scraps of paper in his pockets, Marchesi was happy to play up to the image of philosopher-king, but his achievement was substantial enough. In essence, he reversed Italy’s traditional approach to cooking and simplified it to preserve the flavour and quality of its constituents.
He was much influenced by Japanese cooking, approving of the practice that a sushi chef should dedicate himself to perfecting a limited menu and that only a very few should be allowed to teach. “Humility is the first thing to learn in the kitchen,” he observed. Asked what made a good cook, he replied: “Once I answered it takes passion and intelligence. Now I add love, the fundamental ingredient.”
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Marchesi showed little love for the Michelin guide that had made his name, however. In 2008 he proclaimed that it stifled creativity by making cooks worry about keeping their stars, and he gave his back. He then enraged gastronomes by doing a deal with McDonald’s, devising two hamburgers. The Vivace was based on the tastes of northern Italy and the Adagio on those of the south. Marchesi merely shrugged. “If I’d had to worry about all the comments made about me,” he said, “I wouldn’t have got anywhere.”
Gualtiero Marchesi was born in 1930 in the hotel that his parents ran in Milan. He was so attached to his home town that when the industrialist Gianni Agnelli offered to pay for him to move his restaurant to Paris he turned him down.
At 17, his parents, who also ran a restaurant, sent him to learn the trade in St Moritz, Switzerland. He later moved to Lucerne to study French and German at the hotel school. Yet when he returned home to work in the family business, his real ambition was to become a musician, like generations of his forebears. “I was living for music rather than cooking,” he said. He took lessons with a pianist, Antonietta Cassisa, and in 1957 they were married. “I left the piano and married the girl,” he reflected. They had two daughters: Simona is a harpist and Paola an artist. His wife died several months before him.
The turning point in his career came in his forties when he moved to France and worked in several renowned restaurants, including Ledoyen in Paris. Paul Bocuse (obituary, January 22, 2018), the Sun King of nouvelle cuisine, became a friend.
As well as his restaurants, Marchesi founded a leading cookery school, near Parma, and was soon to open a retirement home for chefs, modelled on that set up by Verdi for opera singers. In recent years he had castigated the cult of television chefs, whom he accused of “mental masturbation”.
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He also opined that the future of Italian cooking lay with family-run osterie, provided that young cooks continued to mix the old and new. Asked if any of his protégés had yet surpassed him, he replied: “To overtake me they must first join me. I’m still on the run.”
Gualtiero Marchesi, cook, was born on March 19, 1930. He died of cancer on December 26, 2017, aged 87