Cooking is like a dish: it takes many ingredients dosed with balance.
An old wooden house from the 1700s, a balcony overlooking the old village and forests all around. It is here, in Sappadaat the north-eastern end of the Dolomitesbetween Cadore and Carnia, heated in winter by an old stube, the dream of two 'creatures' someone called sylvan is nourished.
That house is the Laite and the 'creatures' are called Fabrizia Meroi (yes, that's right, the 2018 Veuve Clicquot Female Chef of the Year) and Roberto Brovedani.
Two dreams and two people who met in 1987 to become one: a couple with the desire to open a restaurant, she a lover of cooking, he a lover of wine.
"Our dream was a small, simple restaurant - Fabrizia tells -. I was very young, I was 19, and my experience was basic (my grandmother and mother ran an osteria in Cividale del Friuli). We wanted to create a place that smelled of family, with attention to detail and a cuisine based on quality ingredients'.
"You know, some dishes that Fabrizia used to make at the beginning are still being made today and are very popular. Maybe we were off to a good start!". Here is Roberto, with his proud love for his wife, respondingYes, but we started off very soft! A simple cuisine. We had a boundless love for food and wine and nurtured this passion'.
Fabrizia and Roberto are two very sweet, simple people, and with that dose of healthy modesty that smells of friendship and home. Because Laite is their home that, despite their successes over the years, and that Michelin star which brought the restaurant to fame, has remained as their original dream desired: a small place, a familiar 'refuge' with attention to every detail with the essence of warmth and hospitality.
And if anyone believes that maintaining identity and dimension is trivial, they are wrong.
The Laite is a place that feels like somewhere else: you walk in and forget everything, and simply let yourself be carried away by the chef's dishes and the fragrant tales of Roberto who, a renowned and award-winning sommelier (he was already working in the dining room of his uncle's hotel at the age of 12), matches wines to dishes with instinctive wisdom. A combination in life and at the table that is often told like a fairy tale, perfect and with a happy ending.
'No, no, believe me,' laughs Fabrizia, 'it's not a fairy tale!
But why bet on such a peculiar land, why stay in Sappada in that ancient dwelling?
“It's his fault, he didn't want to move from here!" Fabrizia laughs again, pointing at her husband (Roberto is from Sappada and when they met, Fabrizia was here to 'do the season'). "I am
Joking,' he continues, 'it's a good choice, with its pros and cons. In the 1980s, if you weren't necessarily in the centre of Rome or Milan, it was a bit of a lost cause. Today, on the other hand, people move around without problems, even if you are far from the motorway or big centres. The pros are all the raw materials, the fragrances, the herbs'.
The cuisine of Fabrizia Meroi smells of Sappada, its meadows, forest and undergrowth. Tradition has it that, even today, there is not a garden in this village that does not conceal, in one corner, at least one tarragon plant, used to flavour various dishes and some cheeses, such as slaunchotte, a sour ricotta cheese that is a must on the Laite menu.
The chef has his own vegetable garden, where he also grows his own spices, and then there are the herbs. "If you go with her into the forest," Roberto urges, "you taste 50 different kinds of herbs!
"I did not do any specific courses - smiles Fabrizia -I am an amateur. But I am in love with herbs: in a small size, in a small leaf, there is an extraordinary strength. I love them all, but lovage, in my opinion, is my herb! If you know it well, you can
use it at its best to enhance many courses: starters, first courses, meats, desserts...'.
Seasonality dominates at Laite: "In each of my dishes there is at least one element that tells the season and then there are the combinations. I like to create contrasts, but overall they have a balance. And I want every ingredient that makes up the dish, and is therefore on the menu, to be felt. Because this territory offers so much. Sometimes you have an ingredient under your nose and you snub it for years. When you then discover it and understand its potential, you can't wait for people to feel that flavour. I think it is important to give everything its due importance. The course I bring to the table is an opportunity, for me and for those who taste it: different products, different and varied tastes. And then there's Roberto with the wines; he's really good at that and at welcoming people in the dining room. After so many years together it is really nice that he knows perfectly what I put in my dishes and with his pairings (he has very special wines) he intensifies their strength'.
"Well I think this is the easy part. Fabrizia cooks, she creates. I taste the wines and propose what I like!" - adds her husband.
Roberto is like that: with that spontaneous irony that you can't help but adore. He gets up from his chair and makes to leave, a commitment with a supplier calls him, and, while I understand that the magic formula of this couple is to compensate each other with defined roles and spaces, before letting him go I cannot resist asking what the secret is to keep the fire that fuels the dream alive.
"It's the people,' they answer me. When you see them at the table tasting the dishes and sipping the wine with their eyes closed'. And for Fabrizia, there is the discovery of a new raw material, a new herbAs it is, if I had to do the same things over and over again, it would become boring; instead, there is the possibility to experiment, to add a new product, and that is an extraordinary stimulus!
But what does Fabrizia Meroi look like?
"I definitely have a peaceful character,' he replies. 'I'm certainly not the one who throws knives in the kitchen! Then of course, to face and endure an activity like this you have to change and mould your character a bit: you have to be broad-minded, with strong nerves. And it's not easy, eh! I remember that at the beginning, when no one knew us, it wasn't easy to overcome the difficulty of the jumps in activity: from super work to nothing, from nothing to super work... Then you find a balance'.
And then came success, notoriety, which, however, has not changed this woman, locked in the kitchen experimenting and devising dishes for hours every day; she who describes herself as 'a bit of a bear' because she doesn't like the media much. And what good would it do her then? She has already conquered her world in this way. Fabrizia's (and Roberto's) dream is in that writing on
wood next to the balcony: Laite, the steep meadows attached to the rocks (this is the Sappadin meaning).
From those meadows the fragrant essences make her cuisine recognisable, mindful of tradition but renewed every day. Fabrizia in fact loves stuffed pasta (a recommendation, try her tortelli!), the ideology of family and festive meals, and alongside these, she brings back to the table the flavours of yesteryear in a look of modern colours and combinations.
An example? Milk was once an essential staple: polenta with milk, cod cooked in milk...
Fabrizia's genius instinct is this: "Last autumn, I thought of creating a dish based on milk; I wanted to use this ingredient in all possible processes, not
necessarily the cheese: from the milk skin, to freeze-dried yoghurt, sour cream, a powder, a wafer... Every part of this dish had a distinctly lactic part.
To accompany it was a vegetable broth infused with a crust of cheese. I remember when I was a child I didn't want to eat cheese and my mother used to put this parmesan crust in my broth, which made me a little uneasy! Then I made desalted cod: raw desalted cod tartare, fennel seasoned with vinegar from
whey derived from milk...
Here, they used to make codfish cooked in milk, I turned it into something else'.
But instinct in the kitchen is not everything; on its own it is not enough. For Fabrizia Meroi, cooking is like a dish: 'You need instinct, you need technique, you need care and study. Certainly
the percentage of instinct is high and gives you an edge; you use technique as a means. But cooking really is a dish: it takes a bit of everything (instinct, technique, care, study)
dosed with balance!'.
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