Chef Antonio Carluccio would rather shop for food than cook it, he tells Kishore Singh over a gargantuan meal.
Antonio Carluccio is grumbling about things. Only a few tables are occupied at Italia — maybe because it is a Tuesday, but do things like that impact restaurant business any more? — he’s flown in only this morning from London, and the first class Jet Airways bed should have put him in a good mood. But Carluccio is probably a grumbler anyway — most chefs are: the asparagus in the kitchen was “stringy”, the overhead table lights remind him, he mutters, of a “mortuary”, there should be fruits, or even vegetables, in bowls, not flowers in a vase, at the reception… you get the drift.
For all that, Carluccio is extremely easy to talk with. The 72-year-old Italian chef is in Delhi as a consultant with hotelier Priya Paul’s first standalone and possibly most ambitious restaurant, which she’s spinning off into a chain. The first to open was the small fine dining Italia in The Park in Bangalore, but in Delhi it is a sprawling, 160-cover restaurant, probably the group’s largest, and located in a mall. A third will open soon in Chennai, and it is for that reason that Carluccio is in India, his visit to Delhi aimed merely at tweaking the menu and the ambience and to “knock out the creases”. As a result, he will most likely not meet any of his Delhi friends introduced to him by his recently ex wife: “Priscilla liked meeting people, she knew everybody in Delhi,” he confirms.
Sitting in the restaurant, where we will eat more good food than can possibly be good for us — even if it is Italian — it is easier to imagine the rakish Carluccio with his deep tan and shock of white hair as a bit actor than a chef, and he’s certainly had his share of celebrity adventures and, possibly, misadventures. He’s also just recovered from a knife wound in London that punctured a lung, though its cause remains speculative, and his separation from Priscilla was more than just a wrench since she, in so many ways, was tied up with his career.
When he was 21, Carluccio moved from Italy to Germany to study languages, and then to Germany to work with an importer of Italian wines. He moved to London in 1975, started working with Sir Terence Conran’s restaurant Neal Street, later becoming its owner. Conran is, coincidentally, Priscilla’s brother.
Carluccio did not always wear his celebrity lightly: while he doesn’t match up to Gordon Ramsay’s fiery temper, he is not known to mince his words, as a result of which Neal Street, and later the Carluccio’s cafes that the couple set up across Britain to serve rustic Italian food, became known for their dining experience, not least on account of the quality of produce Carluccio insisted should go into each dish. When he sold Carluccio’s — purportedly for a sum of £10 million — he could have easily stepped into the role of the layabout millionaire, but there was his delicatessen store, also called Carluccio’s, that kept him busy, as also his consultant’s role in restaurants such as Neal Street, and now Italia where we’re eating degustation style at a horrific pace: Salads, antipasti, thin crust pizzas, lasagna, linguini (“I can taste honey,” Carluccio grumbles), prawns, pan-seared scampi, saffron rosti, sending back the braised lamb shanks untouched because, really, we’ve had enough. Carluccio joins our sampling only with the main courses — he’s been tasting through the afternoon and evening in the kitchen, hoping to have something new on the menu soon. Does he like cooking? “I prefer shopping for ingredients more,” he says, the quintessential visitor to local markets. “A good chef will daily get his ingredients fresh,” he points out, “and which is why the house speciality will change depending on what is available.”
Having found his calling, Carluccio has done pretty much everything celebrity chefs are required to: television programmes, cookbooks, 13 of which he’s authored. “I remember I went to Amandari with the money I earned from one of the books, and stayed there for three weeks before the money ran out,” he grins, the quintessential rogue who enjoys hunting for funghi possibly more than stirring up the perfect risotto. At his restaurants, he’d let guests, even if they were celebrities, alone to read a book and enjoy a meal. “If they didn’t want to be disturbed,” he says, “I wouldn’t go up to greet them, to let them have their privacy.”
A friend of Prince Charles, Carluccio is not averse to sharing off-colour jokes, at which he guffaws himself, long and loud: get him a glass or two of wine and you know he will be the perfect raconteur, probably emanating from the gossip emerging from his restaurant and cafes, though he says that he tends to be discreet, and that no scandals have been associated with Neal Street anyway. That’s because he tends to focus on the food and, because critics seem to spend so much time writing about it, on the ambience. So while we’re groaning about how much we’ve eaten, he’s ready and raring to go grumble about why a section of the restaurant looks “like a factory”. Clearly, he’s more impervious to gargantuan quantities of good food than his guests.
