Gaita Fores says ‘Ciao’ to the new Italy

Italian Ambassador Giorgio Guglielmino, chefs Margarita Fores of Cibo and Carla Brigliadori of Casa Artusi, and Alex and Clifford Lichaytoo of Bacchus Inte national, threw what had to be one of the hippest, most delicious and fun Christmas parties we’ve ever attended.

The winds of change — or rather, the aromas, sights, and sounds of New Italy — wafted through the Italian ambassador’s residence last Tuesday, as Italy’s ambassador to the Philippines Giorgio Guglielmino, chef Margarita “Gaita” Fores of Cibo, chef Carla Brigliadori of Casa Artusi Philippines, and Alex and Clifford Lichaytoo of Bacchus International, threw what had to be one of the hippest, most delicious and fun Christmas parties we’ve ever attended, an “Italian Food & Christmas Celebration.”

Officially the party was part of a mandate the Italian government started last year called “La Settimana della Cucina Italiana del Mondo (The Week of Italian Cuisine of the World),” in which every Italian embassy around the world has to organize a food-related event in the third week of November, from the 20th to the 26th, according to Gaita.

But unofficially, “it’s a fun party because the ambassador is such a young soul, so he doesn’t like ‘old-fashioned’ like before,” says Gaita, who not only popularized authentic Italian cuisine in the Philippines but also holds the distinction of being Asia’s Best Female Chef 2016. “The Italy of today is very different from how the traditional Italian restaurants in Manila present Italian food.”

According to her, the ambassador said, “I don’t know if everyone likes it, but the ‘New Italy’ is what I want everyone to know.”

Gaita, who catered a number of events under the previous ambassador, Massimo Roscigno, noted that new ambassador Guglielmino painted his residence walls red and put modern art inside from Ben Chan, which made the interiors look chic, modern, and yes — oh, so new.

“He is Genovese and he’s written a book on modern art, so he’s hip!” she enthused. “You know Aphro, the gallery of Tina Fernandez? The young girl who runs it, Cher Lui Pio, the ambassador got her to style the event. Earlier they were playing Italian rap... He’s like the New Italy.”

The ambassador wanted his party to be super-casual, so to match his youthful spirit, Gaita brought in her Cibo di Strada, or Italian street food so popular with the youngsters of today: fritto misto (a mix of deep-fried shrimp, squid, zucchini, and eggplant), panino porchetta (a roast pig sandwich on a crusty, Roman-style roll with apple and pear mustard and arugula), pizza fritta (pizza fried like a calzone with prosciutto Cotto and melted Bel Paese, mozzarella, and fontina cheeses inside), arancini di riso (risotto balls made of Bologna-style beef and pork ragu, mozzarella, stewed tomato, porcini mushrooms and gorgonzola), and arrosticini (beef tenderloin on a stick with chili flakes and Tuscan whole wheat).

We died over the beef BBQ and fried pizza, which have got to be some of the most sophisticated street foods we’ve ever sampled. Beef tenderloin on a stick felt like the best Italian Saint’s Feast snack you could ever find in the North End of Boston, the city we used to live in before we moved to Manila. 

Of course, no Italian feast would be truly Italian without pasta: chef Carla was making fresh pasta for fettuccine sauced with veal and beef Ragu Bolognese, and tortellini ai funghi porcini was being heated in butter close to the garden entrance. While the fettuccine was handmade, the tortellini — which Ambassador Guglielmino told me was his favorite dish of the night — was made from Canuti frozen fresh pasta, one of the many top Italian brands Bacchus imports from Italy.

“They’re the biggest importers of ingredients from Emilia-Romagna,” notes Gaita. “The piadina we made the way they do in Romagna — Carla is very particular about that — and then the Ragu that we made today, we used very special Barbera d’Asti from the region — the red wine to make the Ragu from veal and pork.”

Next to the pasta was a wheel of Parmesan that had been so avidly dug into it looked like an archeological excavation after the treasures had all been carted away. “Carla brought that in her suitcase from Shanghai,” Gaita laughs. “She did an event for five days, and then at the end she had this half-wheel of Parmesan left over, so she asked the organizer, ‘Can I just have this? I’ll bring it to Manila because I’m doing an event there.’ They gave it to her; she wrapped it, put it in her suitcase, and brought it here.”

We also have to mention Bacchus’s Galloni prosciutto: “Alex (Lichaytoo) brought his Berkel (meat slicer) so he could slice, and then we launched the brand of the panettone (Italian sweet bread), Loison, which is like super high-end panettone,” Gaita says.

But it wasn’t just ingredients from Italy that were on show. The dessert chocolates were by Tigre Oliva, a homegrown, single-origin brand from Davao, but made by an Italian gentleman with Filipino partners. “So we melted his chocolate, put it in the fountain, and served it with the panettone,” Gaita says. Never one to leave any detail unattended, she also made bowls of crema pasticcera (pastry cream) so that guests could slather it on the chocolate and glazed-chestnut panettones.

The high-profile guests all seemed to enjoy the food and dance music played by the DJ as much as we did. Among the Italian expats we spotted Nedy Tantoco and Patrick Jacinto,  Maritess Tantoco-Enriquez and Renato Enriquez, Felix Ang, Gigi Montinola, Ces Drilon, Ed Calma, Irene Marcos, Rikki and Beng Dee, Bettina Osmeña, chef Chele Gonzalez and wife Teri Echiverri, Michael Salientes, and Pepito Albert.

An Italian culinary center in Manila

We asked Gaita about the pasta fresca and Ragu Bolognese and she said they were based on Casa Artusi recipes. Casa Artusi is a culinary and cultural center in the town of Forlimpopoli, Italy, where Pellegrino Artusi, “the father of modern Italian cooking,” was born.

Unlike Auguste Escoffier, the father of French cuisine, Artusi was not a formal chef. “He was a businessman, a trader who sold fabric,” Gaita clarifies. “He was really just a hobbyist who loved to cook, so he compiled recipes. Nobody wanted to publish his book so he bankrolled it himself, started this book that had, like, 395 recipes from his region — and a few from other parts of Italy — and he did so well in the first years that all these Italian women started to buy it.”

This was in turn-of-the-century Italy, the late 1800s, “when all the Italians were leaving Italy because life was hard and it wasn’t a country yet,” Gaita relates. “They were going to the New World, going to America, so they all brought his book! All these women every year would write him and tell him, ‘You know what? Add my recipe. This one doesn’t work.’ So it was like an interactive work with all his readers, and every year he did a new edition until the 15th year, 1891, when he died. It was 15 years of revising it, and it ended up with more than double the recipes — 795 in the end.”

But Gaita loves it because it was written in beautiful prose, and illuminated the times he lived in. “He was born in Forlimpopoli but lived in Florence and did business there. Florence is where the language is purest, so he used Florentine Italian to write the book, and he did a lot of social commentary about what life was like then, so for the Italians, it’s not Artusi’s cookbook, it’s the Italian people’s cookbook.”

When Casa Artusi decided to open in Asia it was fitting that they chose Gaita, the Philippines’ longtime “ambassador” for Italian food, to do it in Manila. “I felt like it was a certification from the Italian government, almost like a knighthood,” she says. “I started in 2012 and still don’t have a proper campus or a permanent school, so we still do it in Ascott Bonifacio Global City or in the commissary of Whitespace.”

At present, Ascott BGC is the home of Casa Artusi Philippines, and they also house chef Carla when she is in Manila.

“She loves it here, of course,” Gaita says. “When we go (to Italy) in June they have Festa Artusiana — it’s like a big food festival — and because we’re Casa Artusi Philippines they give us a big booth and we do Pinoy food, so we sell adobo, pancit, lumpia, and we choose recipes that have something similar in Italy, so we do pancit molo, because it’s like tortellini in brodo, dumplings in broth.”

The Filipina ambassador for Italian food has now become an ambassador for Filipino food to Italy… things have come full circle for Gaita Fores.