Massimo Bottura is no ordinary chef. As anyone who has watched him tell scared-looking contestants on MasterChef that he wants “to eat their emotions on a plate” will know, he approaches things differently. Over the course of an exhausting hour with the fast-talking Italian, our conversation constantly swoops off at tangents, taking in sociopolitical theory, fast cars, Bob Dylan and the redemptive nature of art. The one thing we don’t talk much about is food.
It doesn’t matter too much because we already know he can cook, courtesy of the three Michelin stars held by his Osteria Francescana in Modena and its permanent residency in the top slots of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants (it’s currently at No 2). The previous day he had cooked a flawless lunch as guest chef at the Connaught in London. Sometimes chefs stumble when asked to perform outside the safety blanket of their own kitchen, but 52-year-old Bottura relished the challenge. “Memory of a mortadella sandwich” took four years to perfect, the sausage meat transformed into a foam and served with a flat bread made with powdered crackling in place of flour. “Caesar salad” is composed of 21 different salad leaves and takes two days to assemble. “The crunchy part of the lasagne” is just that – the bits every child tries to steal when their granny puts the dish on the table.
Bottura had introduced each dish with the pride of a conceptual artist explaining his latest creation. Which, to him, is exactly what he is. “We don’t cook to create great food,” he says. “We cook to give messages. What I want to convey is that if you focus too much on everyday life, on your obligations, on the things you do to pay the bills, you will be lost. But if you can leave open a little space in your life for poetry, it will change your life.”
This, he says, was the message behind his most famous creation, “Oops! I dropped the lemon tart”. What looks like – and indeed came about from – an accident in the pastry section is now, in his eyes, a door to an imaginary world. “One day we were plating two lemon tarts to finish the service and Taka [his sous chef] dropped one, so he was ready to kill himself. ‘No, don’t kill yourself,’ I said. ‘This is beautiful: we’ve found poetry in imperfection, and it’s only through imperfection that you can transfer emotion.’ ”
Am I getting this right? It’s a kind of surrealist pudding? A lemon-flavoured cipher for the unknowable?
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“Almost. Like living in a dream. It makes the visible invisible.”
It’s hard to imagine an English chef, a Gordon or a Jamie, intellectualising a pudding. But whether it’s the Italian accent or the zeal of the delivery, Bottura gets away with it.
His cookbook, Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef, is equally left-field. Explanations of dishes are interspersed with pictures of albums by Thelonious Monk, Lou Reed or Bob Dylan, and favourite books such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The recipes themselves appear almost an afterthought, relegated to the back. “Oh, they are irrelevant,” says Bottura. “It’s about the chaos of my mind. I wanted to call it No Recipes, but the publishers weren’t sure it was a good idea for a recipe book.”
The cover is deliberately plain. “It’s timeless,” he says, “like a Holy Bible. The message is we don’t want people to think this is a trendy book. It’s all about stories.”
Given Bottura’s slender frame, the title makes clear he is an unreliable narrator. “I’m saying, ‘Don’t take life too seriously.’ At the end of the day, we are chefs, working and serving food.” And in many eyes he really isn’t to be trusted. He is famous as the chef who dared to deconstruct Italian classics. “In Italy there are three things that can never be messed with: the Pope, football and your grandmother’s recipes.”
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It wasn’t always that way. When he first started cooking, at a roadside trattoria outside Modena, he focused on traditional dishes from the region, with a heavy emphasis on pasta. After a while, he felt trapped, and fled to New York where he met his wife, Lara. It was she who introduced him to contemporary art, “which is all about the message, not about what you see. It’s all about the transference of emotion.” He’d returned to Modena with the intention of closing the trattoria when Alain Ducasse came in for lunch. By the end of the meal, the world’s most decorated chef had offered Bottura a job in Monaco at the Hôtel de Paris, and Bottura didn’t hesitate.
A few years later, he decided to go it alone again and returned to Modena to open Osteria Francescana in 1995. An osteria is even lower down the pecking order than a trattoria, but the cooking was anything but. Soon, inspired by art, he was experimenting with deconstructed parmesan soufflés and a geometric zuppa inglese. Life was hard, though, and for years it was a struggle to keep things going, Bottura selling his car and beloved Harley-Davidson to keep the osteria afloat.
Then, in 2001, by chance an influential critic got stuck in gridlock on the road from Milan to Bologna and turned off the motorway to have lunch. He raved about it, and by the year’s end Bottura won his first star. “That changed everything. I started to feel comfortable with myself.”
Comfortable, but still the outsider; the Italian chef who seldom serves pasta “because guests feel cheated as it’s so commonplace”, or who will make a risotto by cooking it in parmesan milk rather than adding it at the end.
He tells the story of an artist who, when asked to paint a portrait, “painted a spot of paint in the middle of the canvas. ‘This is your portrait from ten kilometres away.’”
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This, Bottura says, is the perfect metaphor for what he is trying to achieve in his own restaurant, to paint a portrait of the Italian kitchen from 10km away. “We have stretched our culinary traditions so much we think they’ve almost disappeared, but out of the distortion there is always a return to order.”
Crikey. And your diners are getting all that when eating?
“Yes, totally. It’s pure emotion.”
Osteria Francescana, Via Stella 22, Modena, Italy (osteriafrancescana.it). Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura is published by Phaidon