If you ask chef Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana, just named world’s fifth best restaurant at this year’s World’s Best Awards, the answer is no. Indeed, Bottura goes so far as to suggest Italian grandmothers don’t do Italian grandmother’s food justice.

“Tradition does not respect ingredients,” Bottura explained to me.

My first reaction to Bottura’s heretical statement was one of relief: Relief that he and I were chatting on the breakfast terrace at Vila Joya, a secluded boutique resort in the Algarve, and not at a bustling coffee bar in his native Modena. I’d have feared for our personal safety had his sacrilegious words been overhead anywhere in Italy. Bottura was taking on tradition in our private conversation as he would more dramatically a few hours later with his closing-night tasting dinner at this year’s Portugal International Gourmet Festival.

Don’t panic: Italy’s highest-rated chef and recent recipient of a third Michelin star has not forgotten his roots. The artisan producers and farmers of the Emilia-Romagna region have no greater champion. Ask him what Parmigiano-Reggiano he uses and he’ll talk about the 24, 36, 40 and 50-month old cheeses from Hombre single-owner organic dairy with such affection you half expect him to describe the sleeping patterns of each of the dairy’s Modena White Cows.

Bottura is not rejecting his heritage so much as answering his critics who expect their regional Italian food to be rustic, homey and maternal. He tells me he even finds himself confronting his own mother, who swears her tagliatelle are better than his.

A modernist and kitchen chemist spiritually aligned with Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal Bottura has always kept a clear eye – but never a nostalgic one – on the past. Now he’s put a second one there. “This period of economic crisis is no time for fireworks and magic tricks”, he explains. “It’s time for real things”.

In a style of cooking I call “nouveau retro” Bottura revisits regional and national classics with world-class techniques and ingredients. He insists the grandmother who, according to tradition, dutifully boils her bollito misto – Northern Italy’s legendary “mixed boil” –  is killing off the vitamins and decimating the organoleptic flavour compounds in the meat and vegetables. Can’t argue there: I suspect the average Italian nonna is rubbish at getting her head around organoleptic compounds. His radical response was imagined a long way from home (it’s safer there), on a visit to New York. Lying on the ground at Central Park and staring up at the Manhattan skyline he had a vision for what would become a new signature dish: “Bollito misto not boiled”, a reinvention of a classic gently cooked at 65 degrees (150 degrees Fahrenheit), its vitamins and aromas left intact.

The progression of Bottura’s cooking philosophy is purposefully represented in the autobiographical mouthful, “Compression of my Gastronomic Life in the Shape of Pasta and Bean”.  On his menu at Osteria Francescana he lists the dish, ironically or not, it’s hard to say, as a classic. In Portugal he served this three-layered creation in small glasses. At the base was a crème royale of foie gras representing his French culinary training with Georges Coigny and Alain Ducasse; at the top, an air of rosemary in homage to Adrià. The core had Parmigiano-Reggiano crusts standing in for maltagliati (“badly cut”) pasta in a pig-skin-enriched pasta e fagioli (“pasta and beans”), the hearty bean stew emitting call-to-home fragrances from every other open kitchen window in Italy.

“I’ve compressed my grandmother”, Bottura told me rather proudly as he illustrated the dish in my memo pad.

[slider_pro id=”13″]
The pasta e fagioli I tried that night in Portugal was unquestionably the best I have ever had – or might ever have. Still, something other than pasta was missing. The soul maybe? The thrill of discovery felt by a student on his first trip to Italy? To explain my thinking I reminded Bottura of the utter joy felt by the boy in Vittorio De Sica’s film “The Bicycle Thief” when treated to a slice of pizza by his destitute father. Bottura nodded and smiled. Surely he couldn’t match the emotion of that pizza with kitchen wizardry alone. Or could he?

Bottura closed the dinner – and the festival – by turning what he regards as the world’s most snobby food, foie gras, into an ice cream lolly dipped in hazelnuts. He injected the lollies with aged Villa Manodori Balsamic vinegar. Bottura himself produces this vinegar in very small quantities matured in oak, chestnut and juniper barrels.

When I told Bottura I loved his foie gras ice cream-on-a-stick he seemed pleased enough. But when I added a single detail, that the Villa Manodori had dripped down like syrup onto my hands, compelling me to lick the prized 40-year-old Balsamic off my fingers, the three-star chef looked happy: Happy as a young boy from Modena in his grandmother’s kitchen.

One of the great satisfactions of writing the cookbook Made in Marseille was getting to work with Lionel Lévy, who I immediately recognised as one of the most inventive or, rather, re-inventive young chefs in France. The protégé of Alain Ducasse and Gérard Garrigues revisits classic dishes and shakes up their traditional formats. A decade ago he unnerved conservative diners with his salmon crumble, a savoury starter inspired by a classic British dessert, and his tomates farcies (stuffed tomatoes) with caramelised fruits and nuts, a dessert riff on a classic Provençale appetiser. The diners were confused. No one could figure out which end was up.

These days Lévy would upset diners at Une Table, au Sud, his now Michelin-starred restaurant, only by removing from the menu the milk-shake de bouillabaisse, his radical transformation of Marseille’s world-famous fish stew.

As my guest chef at the 23 May BurgerMonday pop-up dinner at the Gray’s Inn greasy spoon Andrew’s Lévy performed cover versions of not one but two American classics, the burger and the BLT sandwich. He merged the two, replacing the customary burger bun with slices of toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic and brushed with olive oil. He had planned to use Poilâne bread from that legendary Parisian bakery’s London outpost until, less than 24 hours prior to the pop-up, our late Sunday supper at the new St John Hotel restaurant altered his thinking. He found the bread superior to Poilâne and wanted it for his burger BLT. I sent an urgent text to St John baker Justin Piers Gellatly, who rounded up 12 sourdough loaves.

Lévy prepared most of his burger accessories in Marseille, vacuum packing them as if for sous-vide cooking and stashing them with ice bags in his hand luggage. He also packed the garlic, ginger and nut topping for the salmon crumble, but sourced British strawberries for a strawberry soup garnished with a lovely lemon curd made by London’s Beas of Bloomsbury. (Starting the menu with a crumble and finishing with a soup was, if not classic, then classic Lévy.) For the burger meat he asked O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge for a coarsely ground mince with a minimum fat content of 30 – yes, three-oh – percent fat. Darragh O’Shea obliged by “enriching” his already fatty beef chuck with plate rib, plate rub fat and rib fat.

Burger BLT Provençale

1. Sourdough
2. Garlic rub
3. Extra virgin olive oil
4. Tapenade
5. Iceberg lettuce in citrus olive oil
6. Beef patty
7. Piment d’Espelette marinade
8. Streaky bacon
9. Pistou
10. Tchoutchouka
11. Slow-roasted tomato

Lévy assembled his burger BLT Provençale with the top slice of toast facing up, revealing bright bands of green and red representing the colours and flavours of the Mediterranean. It was as if this unconventional burger were carrying a Marseille flag, with a slow-roasted tomato as its emblem. Impressive though this literally over-the-top presentation was it resurrected an old Lévy problem: The diners were confused. They couldn’t figure out which end was up. Some conquered their burger by deconstructing it. Others attacked it head-on with a knife and fork. But at nearly every table there was at least one visionary who figured out you could flip your lid and eat the burger BLT in its entirety, with your hands. Lévy’s ingenuity soon became apparent: He and chefs Ludovic Turac and Romain Maunier had left this, the closing touch in the creation of this re-inventive burger, to us.

Just as you can’t put too much faith in a bald barber or in a psychiatrist whose jacket does up from the back, so you cannot fully trust a professional cook with a Body Mass Index anywhere near whatever nonsense the powers that be classify as “normal”.

The premise is neither amusing nor original nor valid. A thick rim of fat might be a requirement for dart players, judging from last week’s World Darts Championship at Lakeside, but Heston Blumenthal, Joël Robuchon, Ferran Adrià, Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller prove you don’t need a body like the Michelin man’s to gather his stars.

It is, however, useful for a chef to be a good eater.  The innovative and, yes, slender chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten told me he consumes each new dish in its entirely before approving it for his menu. Familiar with the laws of diminishing returns, Jean-Georges knows that if he likes the last morsel as much as the first, as was the case with his molten chocolate cake, he probably has a winner.

It’s helpful for a food critic to be a good eater, too.  The more he eats the more he can tell as about the restaurant, the chef and the menu.  Yet at Corrigan’s Mayfair, Norman chose to share a single dessert with his companion.  What a time he chooses to go on a diet!  There are seven puds on the menu, yet Norman thinks sharing one is sufficient for him to write an informed restaurant review in a national quality daily newspaper.

Personally I would prefer my reviewers not share their desserts.  Better they should eat them from beginning to end, just like Jean-Georges. But if they insist on sharing desserts than I’d prefer they share five or six and tell us all about them.