Chef Talk: Le Royal Meridien's Tino Giuseppe

Tino Giuseppe, the Chef de Cuisine at Le Royal Meridien's Favola Italian Restaurant, has long loved Italian food. And growing up in a small town in the Italian region of Calabria (the toe of the boot), one of Giuseppe’s earliest recollections as a young boy was learning how to make pasta from his mother. "She said you need to talk with the pasta. If the pasta replies to you - meaning that when you touch the pasta - it tells you if it's ready or not, you will know for example if it needs a little more oil or egg." And while Giuseppe admits that his own pasta has yet to "speak back" to him the way it does to his mother, his own dialogue with the traditions of Italian cooking continues daily.

Working in a cosmopolitan five-star hotel, Giuseppe recognises the importance of nouvelle or creative cuisine, but he feels that its appeal is limited. "I enjoy creative cuisine, but it has a start and an end. In a way it's like fashion. For five years or ten years it's like Wow! Wow! Wow! And then it's finished." 

Of course, Giuseppe realises that he's producing food, not history, and that he has to cater to contemporary trends in presentation. Still, despite these pressures, one of his stated goals is to adhere as closely as he can to the timelessness of traditional Italian cooking that he knows so well. "Traditional Italian food never dies,” he says. “That’s the thing you really keep in your heart. What you remember about your family and your country. That's traditional food."

Still, anyone with a taste for food from back home in Shanghai knows that getting the right ingredients can sometimes be difficult, whether one is longing for a real Chicken Madras or looking for just the right cheese to top an Eggplant Parmigiana. However, Giuseppe has found that within the last three years the offerings of import items for Italian chefs throughout Shanghai have changed dramatically. "Three years before it was difficult because you couldn't find a lot of imported items, but now I can get tomato paste, semolina and flour, all from Italy. In my restaurant, the flour we use for making pizza is one of the most expensive in Italy and in Shanghai, I think only three or four restaurants are using it. Three years before, I remember all the Italian restaurants were making pizza only using local flour." 

And is there anything he still can't find? Giuseppe finds that he particularly longs for the traditional Italian salamis that are only finding their way into the Middle Kingdom via a cheeky suitcase through customs here and there. "In Italy we have thousands and thousands of salami; so many different types that even local Italian people don't know anything about a lot of them. We still can't import them, even now. Every time I go back to Italy I eat a lot of them, like a pig!"

Salami aside, with all of these great ingredients floating around, those of us at home are likely to get in on the act of whipping up some real Italian pasta on our own. Asked about what advice he can offer to making great pasta, Giuseppe says, "The secret is the flour. You need a good percentage of egg with it. If you find the right percentage between the egg and the flour, the pasta is amazing. If your pasta breaks, there's not enough egg." 

Giuseppe's passion as he speaks about making pasta is enough to make one want to give kneading the dough a try. And who knows, maybe it will talk back.

Tino Giuseppe's Lamb Rack   

Serves four

Ingredients

1kg lamb rack
300g white bread
500g potatoes
5g black truffle
300g cream
5g salt
5g pepper
300g tomato concasse
10g anchovies
20g capers
300g green peas
Garlic cloves, minced
300ml Marsala wine

Method

1. Slice the potatoes, then cook them in a saucepan with cream, black truffle, salt and pepper.
2. After cooking for 25 minutes, arrange the potatoes in a metal baking pan and bake at 180°C for 20 minutes.
3. While the potatoes are in the oven, combine the tomato concasse, anchovies, garlic and capers in a saucepan and heat for five minutes. 
4. Place the tomato mixture, peas and Marsala wine in a blender and purée.
5. Pan fry the lamb rack.
6. Spread herbs on the bread (optional) and toast until golden brown.
7. Arrange the lamb rack, potatoes, pea/tomato purée and herb toast on a plates and serve.