My aim is to create dishes that quite simply are Passalacqua

I was born into the restaurant trade. In the 1930s my grandfather opened a place in Salerno called Bar Varese. It was on the seafront road, in a prime location near the Teatro Verdi and the municipal gardens. They did hot and cold dishes, they served gelato. It was Salerno’s ‘caffè letterario’ or literary café, the chic place to go in town for an aperitif.  My father worked there are as a waiter in the 1950s – on roller skates, wearing a white tuxedo! Later he worked as a photographer with his own darkroom, one of the first in the city to master the process of color development. But he became allergic to the acids in the developing agents, so he went back to catering, opening a ‘tavola calda’ in Maiori on the Amalfi Coast just before I was born in 1974.

Then after the devastating Irpinia earthquake in 1980, which profoundly affected the economy of the region, dad moved the family north to Lodi, near Milan, where he opened a series of restaurants and pizzerias. I was an early starter – aged 13, while still at school, I was already working part time as a pizzaiolo, preparing the dough every day, lighting the oven. By the time I was 20, I was a master pizza maker, heading up a team of five men. That was pretty unusual for a woman back then – in fact, it still is. Eventually, after doing a few internships in famous restaurants in Italy and abroad, my dad passed away, and I found myself back in Lodi, still very young, running the family pizzeria-osteria.

"At this point, I realized that if I was going to go on learning and improving, I would need to do it in my spare time, and use the restaurant as a place to experiment, to apply what I’d picked up from short courses and the few books I could get my hands on. “

Back then, before the Internet, it wasn’t easy to find out even simple stuff like how to make a fruit jelly or how a siphon worked. But the restaurant was doing well, the cuisine had made a qualitative leap, and by 2007 I felt confident enough to move into Milan and open a restaurant called Alice with a friend and colleague, Sandra Ciciriello.
 
The rest is well documented: the first Michelin star in 2009, the decision to move the restaurant to the second floor of Eataly Milan in 2014, where in 2019 after Sandra’s departure the name was changed to VIVA Viviana Varese. It was a resounding success, we had tons of media coverage – but ten years on, I felt it was time for a change. I could have gone back to making pizzas, which is something I love doing, but then the chance to join the family at Passalacqua came along, and I saw it as the biggest opportunity of my life.
 
This place is fantastic. It’s a huge challenge but an exciting one – because the aim, which I share with the De Santis family, is to create dishes that quite simply are Passalacqua. I’m trying to create a style that is perfectly adapted to this place, this villa. This doesn’t mean going back to some rose-tinted vision of the past. For example, few people realise that in the nineteenth century, families in these great villas would have typically eaten a cold buffet for lunch and dinner, as everything was put on the table at the beginning of the meal, from the meat and poultry to the fruit and dessert. I prefer to cook direct and to order, which means you need to be highly organized and the service needs to be perfect. At the same time, though, I want to stay open and flexible. A guest asked for a crêpe suzette the other day. I’ve never made a crêpe suzette in my life, but I tried and it came out well – so I’ve learned something new!
 
Cooking is discovery for me – but it’s also memory. Take one of my signature dishes, pasta con le patate, pasta with potatoes. It was part of the cucina povera of the area south of Naples where I grew up – simple, and filling, and cheap. My mum used to make it all the time: when I got home from school it would be there, waiting for me on the table. She would use smoky, tangy pecorino cheese, and pine nuts, and lots of basil. She’d often forget to take the garlic out before it got burnt. I reproduce that seared note in my version by toasting the garlic really well. This is my ‘piatto della memoria’.