2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:20
"The highlight is emotion": even if he won't win the Pulitzer for the title, the new book from Antonino Cannavacciuolo is already among the cooking bestsellers on Amazon.
And to think that it only came out a few days ago (careful, dear Doctor Mozzi, who have been there on the podium for months now, without us mere mortals being able to know why).
Cannavacciuolo, born in Vico Equense (NA) in 1975, graduated from the local Hotel School in 1994, apprenticeship in France at the Auberge dell'Ill in Illhaeusern, returning to Italy at the restaurant of the Grand Hotel Quisisana in Capri before taking over in 1999 the restaurant of the Hotel Villa Crespi in Orta San Giulio on Lake Orta (two Michelin stars, in 2003 and 2006), to open the Cannavacciuolo Cafè & Bistrot, a three-storey venue with a terrace overlooking Piazza Martiri della Libertà, adjacent the legendary Coccia Theater in Novara, and to land on television with Cucine da Incubo and Masterchef 5, is the new king of chefs: Give him a limestone encrusted faucet and he'll turn it into gold.
Because? When did it happen that our Antonino turned into the one who always wins?
Since when did the massive figure of the chef from Campania begin to overshadow even that figure so praised by the female audience named Carlo Cracco?
All this until yesterday, when Camillo Langone he poured out his fierce prose on the big cook that shines like a star:
"That of Cannavacciuolo is a television and press office kitchen, based on overcooked ideas such as the combination of North and South to which the agnolotti del plin with Neapolitan ragù are owed, on clichés such as" between innovation and tradition ", on trombonaggini that the "symphony of surprising pleasures for the palate" objectively is ".
What does it refer to the article appeared yesterday in Il Giornale? At a recent meal consumed by the writer, a well-known gastronomic pen, right at Cannavacciuolo Cafè & Bistrot, perhaps the place that gave Cannavacciuolo the biggest headaches, including a couple of our reviews.
Not contented Langone focuses on the prices of the place, not exactly in line with the definition of bistro:
"Appetizers and first courses cost an average of 15 euros, the second also 24 euros as in the case of beef tenderloin in bread crust and Nebbiolo sauce".
And the article concludes by increasing the dose:
"In contradiction with being big and fat, pot-bellied and bearded as well as flaunting virile, threatening knives, Cannavacciuolo does nothing but abuse the feminine word" emotions ": on the website, in the title of the new book published even by Einaudi, everywhere. A concept that is not reflected even in the dishes, all well executed (except for the elderly Luciana octopus) but often so delicate as to be feeble, in front of which one can only remain impassive ".
Heavy criticism for a chef who, the uninterrupted transition from one project to another may have distracted from the initial core-business, namely the kitchen.
Moreover, precisely on the eve of the reopening of the Villa Crespi restaurant, his main business, where a long construction site has turned everything upside down with maintenance operations described as open-heart operations.
Who knows what the three hundred booked at Villa Crespi for the first opening weekend will think reading the article by Camillo Langone.