It was not long before the 2022 season of Bake Off Italy and inaugurated the new year by flanking Damiano Carrara to the conduct of Cake Star. Class of '90 and originally from Campania, Tommaso Foglia began to make headlines when, in 2020, he was elected best 'Emerging Pastry', the only one under 30. But the climb to success, or rather the determination to turn his passion into a full-fledged profession, began much earlier.
Tommaso is a very young talent whose story so far already foreshadows the best happy ending: he will be (and perhaps already is) another big name in Italian pastry making. A story that began in Nola, at a very young age, when, as the son of bakers, he began to discover his first love, that for leavened goods.
"The bond with leavened goods,' he says, 'and with my family is a bond of memory. My parents were very young when I was born and, with all the sacrifices they were making to carry on the business, they didn't have much free time. So they would take me with them to the bakery, and I would play in the workshop, with flours and doughs. So the love for leavening was a love born as a real game, in fact for many years I never saw it as a job. But from there to the dream of carrying on the family tradition as an adult, the step was
short'.
But sometimes fate, tickled by aptitude, has imagination and dreams greater than our own. At just eighteen years of age, in 2008, Tommaso Foglia entered as an intern in the kitchens of Don Alfonso 1890, the historic, bistarred restaurant in Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi, of the Iaccarino family.
Humility, confrontation and feet firmly planted on the ground are the values that he immediately embraces, and which will remain ingrained in him forever. 'Don Alfonso was the first person I met,' he recalls, 'when I arrived at the restaurant. At school they had told me to ask for Mario Iaccarino and so I did. I arrived and asked a man dressed in dungarees, who was returning from the countryside, about him. I talked to Mario and finally asked if I could shake hands with Chef Alfonso. 'You spoke to him just now when you arrived!' he told me. Of course I was immediately struck by great embarrassment, but above all I was amazed by the humility of a person of his calibre. I carry this moment in my memory as the first lesson in simplicity, values and modesty'.
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