Password #foodporn! Social networks flooded with photos of food; the only rule, make your mouth water. This is the game-mania that has been raging for years now, whether it be food bloggers or Mrs Maria. But there is someone who has made a life project out of his obsession with food, indeed, thanks to this obsession he has literally revolutionised his life.
La Giorgio Gramegna's story goes beyond pornographic photographs, and beyond passion. Because the Foodporn for him, and thanks to him, has become synonymous with talent. Omnivorous and without food prejudices, Giorgio has had a 'problem with food', as he puts it, since he was a child. In truth, the problem was simply the desire and need to spend more hours contemplating his mother while she cooked than playing, and then, when he was in the kitchen, to be locked in his room leafing through photos of the dishes he had made; later still, to become a fetishist, in the sense that he loves, or rather cannot help it, watching people taste a dish for the first time. Because, he says, "when you look at pictures and your mouth waters it's pornography, but when you then taste... that's the erotic part!"
Thus was born FOOD PORNOGRAPHY®, a website along the lines of #foodporn of course, but above all, since 2015, a true experiential journey. Sometimes it is necessary to take winding roads to find oneself and realise oneself. Today Giorgio is an entrepreneur, chef and artist. FOOD PORNOGRAPHY® is no longer just a site of wonderful pictures of dishes, but an all-round catering project: food, drinks, events, products and home chef services. But all this, the chef that many nowadays call unconventional has also conquered it through disappointments and enormous difficulties. It was 2012 when Giorgio Gramegna participated, with naive enthusiasm, and the mobile phone always in his pocket ready for the
shot, at Italy's best-loved cooking talent show: Masterchef. "I knew immediately that it was not for me,' he says. I was the first eliminated of my season and I came out devastated, because I wanted to impress the judges, just like I had done in the selections. After the elimination, I didn't want to cook any more, because I experienced this as a defeat, as my biggest failure'.
But to Giorgio that fixed idea kept tickling his mind; talent when it comes from the bottom of the heart does not want to be annihilated. And that of Giorgio Gramegna managed to explode. That failure was the impetus to prove to himself that he could do it.
"I had my own company, other partners, I was an entrepreneur. I gave it all up and started again, to do a job that I had never done except at an amateur level. I didn't want to have any regrets, I had to try, against all those who thought I was throwing away a real trade for a passion that could remain an after-work activity!"
The love of good food won out and today in his restaurant in Milan Giorgio takes you on a journey of expectation and anticipation: he tells you about the dish, then serves it to you, you smell it and finally taste it. The dish is obviously something you have never tried before. "It must be just like when you give your first kiss, if you like it your expression reveals it to me; if I can then make you fall in love then I have really touched your heart!"
And if the first kiss is the one you will remember forever, it will be the same for the experience of Food Pornography: a Milanese risotto where saffron is served in a cocktail, a seafood diavola pizza with a Di Saronno tuna sauceor that noodle with spicy mango sauce, vacuum-marinated onion and nigella seeds that is not by chance called Arroganza. And even better is the experience between the mystical and the profane of dining guided by the vibrations of a Tibetan bell in which he mixes the cocktail to go with the course.
'Today I have finally reached the awareness of who I am,' Giorgio continues. 'I do not compare myself to the great chefs because I did not go to any cooking school, but everything I have done and do is dictated by my heart, by passion. In order to learn how to work the raw materials well, I have been to many professional friends, and then a thousand expenses made to try to make dish after dish, to find my method, my dimension. I never use many ingredients in a dish, but I propose unusual combinations, I marry the ingredients together so that the combination is very pleasing. They are not super weird, they are just unusual'.
The greater the gamble, the more willing the guest is to be guided through the experience; when it happens the voyeurism of the chef reaches orgasmic levels. And we are not talking about pornography, but art. But to understand this we have to go back again to Masterchef, to that negative experience necessary for the creative spark to ignite. "When I made the plate for the selections I thought it was really beautiful and took many photographs. Then I noticed that even after the contents of the plate had been eaten something beautiful remained and I took more photos. After a few years I found these photos again and liked them even more, so I tried an experiment.
I invited some friends over for dinner and served them all the same dish. I started observing them as they ate and noticed that everyone had different expressions, ate it differently (with their hands, with a fork, with chopsticks). Then I collected the empty plates and photographed them. With the photos I made pictures and hung them on a wall. When I called my friends back to show them, they could not believe their eyes: they had made those pictures, it was the sign of themselves that they had left on the plate. A few days later I had an event at home and a psychologist was there. She liked those paintings and I told her what they were. Amazed she started the game of trying to guess whether the painting was a woman's or a man's and she didn't get one wrong. At that moment I realised the power of what I had discovered and a project was born'.
That project is called FOOD Print. The sign that remains on your plate after you have finished eating it is transformed into a painting: an indelible memory, an unprecedented point of view and a unique sign depicting you, from plate to 'canvas'. "These paintings really represent people in 360° because they have no right or wrong direction; you can turn them any way you want and every time they turn they look like a new painting. Just like we are all of us, who are sad one day and happy the next; or the way others see us: one person likes me, another dislikes me. But it is always me, it is only the observer who changes; you can change the point of view of the painting just like you change the point of view of a person! Food Pornography is also this: food that becomes art!
Ph. Gallery: Stefano Adami
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