A dinner at a Davide Scabin’s establishment is an event that keeps you thinking and musing for a while. And the tasting menu he now offers at his new Carignano Restaurant at the Grand Hotel Sitea in Turin is no exception. In many ways, this is not your run-of-the-mill hotel restaurant. A great team in the front of the house and a small but compact and efficient one in the back curate an intense experience for the patrons sitting at the five tables in the dining room.
The experience is thrown at you as a gentle gauntlet: time may be passing, and the team members do turn the hourglass placed on every table at each time a course arrives. The kitchen staff also keeps close tab on how the guests advance along the menu. However, the challenge for the diners is to enjoy the moment for what it is, moving from the bar for a kick-ass gin and tonic to enjoy with jamón hibérico and melon to the white and minimally decorated dining room and finally to the the comfortable sofas of the hotel lobby for petit fours and a deceptively light farewell long drink, Charro Negro.
The menu reads (in Italian): “Food as journey sustenance to escape the control of linear time and allow the festive to burst in… eating as an event to disrupt everyday life, opening a dimension that elude any categorization.” At first glance, such proclamation may come across as hyperbolic even for a chef of Scabin’s caliber and fame. However it is enough to be even cursorily familiar with his professional trajectory to take it at face value as a declaration of intent.
The current menu carries the title “LGBT#1,” followed by the warning: “nothing is what it appears to be.” LGBT unusually stands for Long Gourmet Brainstorming Time, as the gorgeous printed menu announces in English (unfortunately, the menus are numbered and we are not allow to bring it home). Although no direct reference to the actual LGBT community is anywhere to be found, queerness is at the core of many of the dishes. Here, queerness signal the intentional embrace of identities that defy definitions, that are not necessarily in transition (as transition often implies a point of arrival) but rather find comfort in the unclaimed space of liminality, in the absence of stable representations, flags, and allegiances. The theme of the threshold is directly evoked by the greeting “welcome to the dias de los muertos” on the menu, where the Mexican holiday is alluded to as a moment in which boundaries are blurred and mutual gifts between dimensions that usually do not connect are exchanged.
Too highfalutin and abstract? Let me bring it down to the dishes. I found the oyster, green banana, and chorizo in a Thai style particularly impressive. Three elements that would not make sense on paper work famously well together on the plate. Eating all the components together in a single bite provides an unusual mouthfeel and a surprising flavor profile. This is not just fusion. The elements from different culinary traditions are assembled in an organic mix that totally makes sense, eliminating all borders as though the components have always been meant to be consumed together. This has none of the colonial attitudes that at times plague unoriginal fusion. The chef manages to avoid the traps of cultural appropriation by treating each ingredient in ways that do not really belong to their cuisine of provenance but rather elaborating them in his own novel and personal manner, showing respect and understanding. It is not about asserting power: it is rather about establishing unexpected communication lines. Scabin also plays around Italian and French traditions (both high and low brow) showing the same sense of fondness mixed with adventure and at times cheekiness, displaying command and knowledge while bending textures and preparations without undue deference.
Another dish that discretely plays with the theme of boundaries is the savarin of smoked rice, chanterelles, and unagi, with snails in persillade, garlic broth, and a shot of Belgian gin Amuerte. It is a celebration of swamps and brackishness, of creatures like eels and snails that defy easy classification, of rice between soil and water.
All the presentations are quite straightforward, with cutlery and crockery gleaned from the hundred-year old repositories of the hotel. While all dishes are visually pleasant (I particularly liked the candid – bordering on immaculate- look of the five onion iced soup), the goal is not to intrigue with gimmicks but to present a series of solid dishes that reveal the research ethos the chef is known for, his interest for design approaches, and his honest relationship with science.
I had the opportunity to chat with Scabin at the end of the meal (not an unusual occurrence, as he tends to greet his guest before they leave). His perspective on creativity and the work of a chef are engaging and stimulating. I could write quite a few food design papers about his interpretation of culinary innovation. And who knows, it may happen…