This celebration also brought to NY some of the best female chefs, and I had the chance to meet them during an epic dine-around experience in which an excellent six-course menu was served an provided a wide spectrum of dishes that highlighted the strength of each of them.
The dine-around started with Karime Lopez, Chef de Cuisine at Gucci Osteria Francescana, an intimate restaurant by world-renowned chef Massimo Bottura in Florence. Karime, a Mexican-born chef with a stellar culinary experience at some of the world’s best restaurants grew up in a food-oriented family, who owned and ran several traditional restaurants in Mexico City. While she was in Paris for her Arts studies at the Sorbonne, the young chef regularly frequented the city’s boulangeries and fell in love with a novel form of cuisine, the art of patisserie. She transferred to the culinary school in Spain and after that she started working at his first restaurant job. Her career took Karime all over the world and after several years she moved to Italy and she started working with Massimo Bottura. Her dish was a very eye-catching and delicious “Little Italy Tostada”, a revised version of the classic tostada that included some elements of the Italian culture like tomatoes and burrata. When she is not in the kitchen working, Karime loves to speak and get inspired by the people from her team, restaurant’s clients, producers at the local farmer markets and, of course, landscapes.
The second course was a pasta made by Missy Robbins, an American chef who has held a Michelin star at two restaurants and owns two (AMAZING) Italian restaurants in Brooklyn, Lilia and Misi.Missy prepared Occhi (eye-shaped pasta) filled with sheep’s milk ricotta with bottarga and lemon, a mixed of flavors that allowed you to close your eye and imagine you were sitting in a restaurant on a sea cliff in South of Italy drinking white wine.
From the flavors a South of Italy, the dinner moved to the very North of Italy, in the Veneto region to meet Petra Antolini, owner of Pizzeria Settimo Cielo. Petra has the same energy of a Rockstar: her image, the way she works the dough the way she talks to the dough, it’s just incredible. Her knowledge about the different kind of flours is incredibly shocking and inspiring. Her creation was Pizza made with Mozzarella Fior di Latte, Datterini tomatoes, a foam of Grana Padano Riserva DOP, anchovy colatura and a lemon-flavored crumble on top. Petra is not just an incredible pizzaiola, but also a genuine person that is using pizza to fight inequality. In 2017 she founded with other female pizza makers, the organization “Donne di Pizza, Donne di Cuore” aims to empower women to feel capable because, as she said “We’ve had to work more than double to receive the same consideration as men pizzaioli; the birth of this group is to prove that women can do it, and do it well. Perhaps if there was more gender equality – not only in the pizza-making world, but in professions across Italy – more women would have the courage and feel supported when reporting or standing up to injustices such as violence.”
From the Rockstar of Pizza to the first woman at the helm of a restaurant awarded four stars by the New York Times, Melissa Rodriguez Executive Chef at Del Posto. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America where she earned a degree in Culinary Arts, she spent time cooking with Elaine Bell Catering and Oceana. She then started working at Daniel as a line cook, and after 5 years she left the restaurant as a sous-chef. Melissa joined the team at Del Posto in 2011 where she was promoted to Chef de Cuisine in 2015 and Executive Chef two years later. Her dish was Kamut linguine pasta with Geoduck and lemon that takes inspiration from the traditional pasta with clams. This version is made with lightly smoked geoduck to add some depth of flavor and finish with clam butter, coarse breadcrumbs made with lemon agrumato and lemon zest.
The fifth dish of the night was made by Antonia Klugmann, an Italian Chef that helms the kitchen of the Michelin starred restaurant L’Argine a Vencò, located in Friuli Venezia Giulia, North East of Italy.Her dish pork cheeks with coffee sauce, glazed strawberries and strawberries sauce, green beans and pesto. Antonia comes from Friuli Venezia Giulia, the most North-Eastern region of Italy that was controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I. The cuisine of her territory is a result of the contamination of different cultures and the influence of Central European cuisine, taught her to pair meat and fruit.
Last but not least, the dessert, created by Ana Roš, a chef from Slovenia that can speak 7 languages and she likes to use all of them in order to hunt and explore the gastronomic tradition of Central Europe, a heritage she never loses touch with, even when she travels far away with her mind. Deer and wasabi, duck and cinnamon, trout and fried weed, these are some of the few dichotomies that Ana likes to create and that often express her personality. Her dessert was a reinterpretation of a dish called Čompe s skut, a traditional meal made with unpeeled boiled potatoes and fermented cottage cheese that is very spicy and sour. Her new version is sweet, made with pear, bee wax, and almond pit.