Folly in Foligno
Every autumn, the central Italian town of Foligno hosts a spectacular festival of pasta. This year, Martin Major, head chef at L’Autre Pied, was invited along to engage in a head-to-head cook-off with one of the town’s best-loved pasta chefs. Mark Riddaway went along to watch the battle unfold
Martin Major, head chef at L’Autre Pied, fills his lungs with fresh autumnal air and gazes out across a dense oak forest. Gentle sunshine flickers across the Umbrian landscape. “Aaaah,” he says, smiling broadly. “La dolce vita.” And that, without question, is the single most accurate and coherent piece of Italian that either of us will speak all weekend.
In season, the woodlands here will be loaded with truffles: a local delicacy that we’ll consume in some quantity over the next few days, finely grated over just about every type of pasta imaginable and even subsumed into a lush chocolate cake. Our little country stroll is just a brief diversion on a journey that has taken us from London to Foligno, a small town in the region of Umbria, one of the most beautiful yet underappreciated parts of Italy. Foligno is famous for its two annual festivals: a jousting tournament that’s been going since the middle ages, and an annual food festival known as I Primi d’Italia. Or to put it less romantically, ‘the starters of Italy’.
Primi are the pasta and rice dishes eaten as the first course (not counting the antipasti) in a traditional multi-course Italian meal. Martin has been invited here to participate in the festival. I’m here to fill my face.
And I’m not alone. Every autumn, thousands of people flood onto the narrow streets of Foligno to enjoy tastings, demonstrations, dinners and talks, all of them linked to pasta. It’s a bit like the Edinburgh festival, but for carbs rather than culture.
Over the course of the weekend, together with Martin and his wife Charlotte, I will be almost brutalised with hospitality, swept along by the Marylebone-based travel consultant and force of nature Josephine and her quietly practical Italian factotum Valentino to vineyards and food producers, breath-taking cathedrals and quaint villages. And lots and lots of restaurants.
We will eat an obscene amount of food, and we’ll gain some important knowledge. We will, for example, learn that ‘Oi!’ is a warm Umbrian greeting as well as an aggressive London interjection. We’ll discover that there’s a real village called Bastardo. And we’ll learn that the Italian word for fennel, ‘finocchio’, is also a derogatory term for a gay man, for reasons that escape all understanding.
Foligno is a characterful little town. Located bang in the centre of Italy, its importance as a railway junction led to it being heavily bombarded in the 1940s, and the damage caused by Allied planes was seemingly exacerbated by some of the area’s post-war architects. As a result, the beautiful churches, piazzas and medieval streets typical of the region are punctuated by buildings that are less baroque, more Bracknell.
Our hotel, for example, is an absolutely beautiful neoclassical palazzo: a stunning period building tastefully refurbished with Designers Guild wallpaper and the kind of cool, touch-sensitive lighting consoles that cause you to randomly slap at the walls when you wake up in the pitch dark needing a wee. But on the next street, in a grubby 20th century concrete retail unit, is a branch of Blockbuster video—the continued existence of which is perhaps the single most surprising revelation of the weekend.
The result of this juxtaposition is that, unlike some of Italy’s more picture-perfect hilltop towns, Foligno feels like a place where real people live and work, rather than just hanging around like extras in a period drama. It has a bit of spirit to it—and never more so than tonight, as this most Italian of festivals gets underway.
I Primi d’Italia sprawls around the entire town. There’s a ‘villaggio della polenta’; there’s a square devoted solely to amatriciana sauce, including a looped video projected onto a church wall of guanciale and tomatoes cooking down on a hob; there’s even, for coeliacs and clean-eaters, a tiny gluten-free section, tucked away down a back street.
The town’s central piazza is dominated by a stage, topped by a sophisticated demonstration space that looks like the studio for Saturday Kitchen, pictures from which are beamed onto a cinema-sized screen. It was here that Martin was initially scheduled to be appearing, but after some bureaucratic shenanigans that I’m sure are entirely untypical of Italy, he’s now set to be performing off the main drag, in whatever the Italian is for the festival fringe.
A prominent local chef, Riccardo Vitiani, has invited Martin to his highly popular Le Mani In Pasta restaurant to perform ‘back to back’ with him: each of them will prepare a pasta dish using the same ingredients, a large crowd will eat both dishes, then choose a winner using voting cards emblazoned with the two chefs’ mugshots.
Just to contextualise that: Martin, an Englishman, is hoping to compete in the construction of a pasta dish against a man from the heartland of pasta who owns a fantastic restaurant with the word ‘pasta’ in its name. Before we set off, Martin had emailed to ask whether Riccardo’s pasta rolling machine had an attachment for tagliatelle. The response: there is no pasta rolling machine; it’s all rolled by hand, just like nonna taught him. This could all go horribly wrong.
Rather than being stressed, though, Martin—one of the sunniest individuals you could ever hope to meet—is absolutely buzzing. He’s practised his dish at home—squid ink tagliatelle with fennel and truffle, adapted from an old Marco Pierre White recipe—and he feels ready to show Foligno his skills. “If you don’t try, you never know,” he says. “I’m happy with the recipe. I doubt it’s how they see pasta, which is quite interesting. I’m going to use a stock with a bit of butter in.”
How French! “I know, it’s almost deviant. But I’m not coming here to teach grandmothers to suck eggs. This is the way that I know how to make delicious pasta. I’d be lying to myself if I tried to be Italian about it.”
We arrive at Riccardo’s restaurant in the afternoon, bolstered by a long lunch. Mani In Pasta (Italian for ‘hands in pasta’—a nod to the absence of a rolling machine) is a lovely little place, with a long open kitchen and an intimate low-lit snugness. Before setting up on his own exactly a year ago, Riccardo had worked in most of the town’s best restaurants. His most recent post had been as a sushi chef, but he returned to his culinary roots because (and this is only roughly translated) sushi eaters are a bunch of pretentious snobs. Now, he’s in his element: a big, friendly man, prowling behind the pass of his very own establishment, wrapping his customers in bear hugs and pounding balls of pasta dough into submission.
Martin’s Italian stretches no further than the word ‘prego’ (and now, thanks to our recent discovery, the word ‘oi’). Riccardo’s English is equally limited. At first, their interaction is friendly but stilted, with Martin attempting to make himself understood through a form of culinary charades and the addition to English words of the letter ‘o’: ‘egg-o’, ‘film-o’. By the end of service, though, we can see them chatting away, laughing, slapping each other’s backs, communicating through some form of cheffy Esperanto. Somehow, through mangled language and elaborate mime, they become best friends for the night.
Watching highly talented chefs at work is a singular pleasure for a civilian like me, especially like this: working alone, without a brigade of helpers, Martin is light on his feet, nodding and bouncing like there’s a drum’n’bass tune playing in his head, a blur of rhythmic movements. Charlotte lets on that he’s an accomplished breakdancer, and you can definitely see it: even with a big knife in his hand, he looks moments away from pulling off a six-step.
While Martin rolls his pasta in the measured manner of a classically-trained pastry chef, Riccardo’s approach is more dynamic: rolling the dough around his pin and then flicking it out in one powerful but seemingly frictionless snap of the wrists, forcing the gluten molecules to submit. It’s the kind of ingrained skill that can only be picked it up at the age of six from your elderly but sprightly Italian grandmother.
As service approaches, there’s a sudden crisis. Possibly because of the unfamiliar knife, possibly because of all the wine that people keep pouring for us, Martin’s usually immaculate motor skills go suddenly awry. While slicing a bulb of fennel, the blade slips and off comes the end of his middle finger.
There’s a lot of fretting and fussing, but Martin hasn’t come this far to be daunted by some severed blood vessels. He insists that everything is absolutely fine and it’s just a minor flesh wound that needs wrapping with a plaster or seven. He continues determinedly, his hand held together by a plastic glove and the entire contents of a first aid kit, but sports the slightly haunted look of a man who’s going to have to hand-roll 40 portions of tagliatelle while in agonising pain.
Martin’s dish comes out first. The inky tagliatelle and immaculate slices of squid create interwoven ribbons of black and white, coated in a rich stock and topped with crunchy fennel and a generous shaving of local truffle (Riccardo has a whole draw of them, which makes Martin go a bit weak at the knees). It’s as delicious as it sounds. The locals hoover it up, without a single one of them offering Martin outside for disrespecting their country.
Riccardo’s dish follows: a disk of Umbrian black potato (a source of considerable local pride), topped with filled parcels of squid ink pasta, pieces of squid and more of that fantastically ubiquitous truffle. It’s very good—a little more delicate in its presentation than I’d expected, but full of flavour.
The voting turns out to be something of a non-event. The home crowd knows exactly what to do—vote for the man who cooks their dinner every night—but Martin still gets more votes than there are English people in the room, which is probably as much as he could ever have hoped for in this culinary bearpit. He is sanguine in defeat: “I’m just glad I made pasta in front of an Italian and he didn’t throw me out of his kitchen.” His gory hand still smarts, but the wine soon numbs it.
The next day, after an all-too-brief sleep, we’ll consume a large breakfast, then take a tour of Assisi, birthplace of St Francis, followed by a long lunch on a pretty little terrace in the hilltop town of Montefalco, followed by a wine tasting in the remarkable carapace of the Tenute Castelbuono vineyard, designed by the contemporary sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. Then we’ll head straight back into the festival for the day’s main event: a special pasta menu served up in a deconsecrated church by Emanuele Mazzella, a local Michelin-starred chef.
The guests are everything you’d expect from the Italian bourgeoisie: well-groomed men with flicky hair and suits that fit properly, women who look like they wake up looking immaculate, children who know how to behave in restaurants. The waiters are all kids from the nearby catering college, and they’re clearly terrified. Rather than being served a table at a time, guests are selected to receive a plate seemingly at random. The food, though. Oh, the food. It would have been even better had we not had that four-course lunch. And the wine tasting. And that cake at breakfast.
As we leave, having achieved a level of carbohydrate loading that must verge on being dangerous, the heavens open and we end up utterly drenched. It’s as though the Italian weather gods have decided to make their English visitors feel at home. Hospitality here, at I Primi d’Italia, is apparently limitless.
La dolce vita, indeed.
From the Marylebone Journal, issue 12/06
