His style of cooking Repubblica described him as "carefree madness". And perhaps some may have also thought him a little crazy when in 2019 he launched to himself and the world of catering in Turin the challenge of the UnforgettableThis is a place with a single counter for ten covers and a kitchen design with vegetables at the centre and proteins as a side dish.
If we add to this the fact that the restaurant is in a hidden corner overlooking the few remaining medieval alleys in Turin, which at first only the most curious would discover, the predictions of an almost impossible project are in place.
Instead Christian Mandura won. The proposal of dishes redesigned in terms of balance, which overturned the classic idea of the table, with proteins and carbohydrates transformed from protagonists to satellites, won over the public. Creativity, taste and technique on the way to a change that made a challenge a reality and turned a name into a fact: because today truly the cuisine of Christian can be described as unforgettable.
And when the incomprehensible becomes comprehensible, it also happens to enter the gourmet bible by conquering the first Michelin star. Not bad for a boy who, as a child, saw his future drawn elsewhere, certainly not in the kitchen.
"At the Hotelier Bobbio I enrolled in dining room,' he says, 'and only later in cooking. My mother had always worked in the restaurant business, but I was not convinced that that could be my world. When I finished my studies then, my ideas were anything but clear. So much so that my first job was in an earring factory. I had my first little girl and I just wanted to earn a little extra money. So one day I called a friend of mine and asked if the restaurant next to the bakery where he worked was looking for someone. It was thus, almost by chance, that I entered the kitchen of Frà Fiusch's Teverna and it was there that I rediscovered and rediscovered all that passion that I had always read in my mother's eyes and experienced as a boy. I was overwhelmed in every sense, an important year of growth and training; I learned all the basics of traditional Piedmontese cuisine'.
But life in the kitchens is far removed from the media spectacle; the workloads, the hours... a complex routine that is a source of sometimes unmanageable stress. After a year, Christian was tired: "Fate,' he continues, 'made my path cross that of Davide Scabin. Seeing me so fatigued, he told me that when you no longer feel like going into the kitchen it is better not to go in, to take a break. The next day I quit my job and left for Spain, and this is what I did for the next four years: every year in April I would resign from the kitchen I was working in and devote my regenerating space to travelling, abroad'.
Sometimes life takes you on strange turns, giving you the impression that you always return to the starting point, but then it takes you back home, where you look in the mirror and realise who you are and what you want to do. This is what happened to Christian Mandura, when in 2011, in the midst of our country's economic crisis, he found himself in London. 'Like many of my peers I went there to look for work; at that point I knew I wanted to be a cook and nothing else, what I lacked was to really understand where I wanted to mark my path. In London I realised that I wanted to go back to Italy, that it was in Italy that I wanted to do this job, and that I wanted to do it well. So I went to Tuscany...'.
Important kitchens for Christian followed, from Noma to Cambio with Matteo Baronetto. And then came the time and the opportunity to experiment and dare.
"On Saturdays and Sundays,' he recalls, 'I used to help out at Geranio di Chieri, my mother's trattoria. She would make traditional lunches, while for the dinners I proposed a fourteen or fifteen-course tasting menu that was at the antipodes of my mother's cuisine: centrepiece plants to eat, yeast broth, prawns with dehydrated cabbage carapace... A cuisine based on technique and dedicated to the amazement of diners'.
And while Christian stimulates the disbelief of customers accustomed to pasta and beans, comes the idea of what today is the Unforgettable. "Some customers asked me if I would be interested in opening a restaurant with them. I somewhat jokingly replied that the only challenge I would accept would be a restaurant in the centre of Turin with only one table and a maximum of ten seats. They liked it and so I started looking for the restaurant, creating the concept, working closely with the architects. For the format I was inspired by two important influences; Frantzén in Stockholm, which has this convivial counter, and Chef's Table in Brooklyn. For the set-up, on the other hand, we looked to the world of fashion and in fact when you enter Unforgettable, if it weren't for the underplates on the counter, you might well think you were in an atelier. It has none of the classical appearance of a restaurant'.
But besides being a creative place, what characterises Unforgettable is also and above all the new restaurant concept of the vegetable at the centre. A change to which Christian Mandura designed to respond to a need: to move away from the boom of the kitchen of wonder and find its own outfit, identity and uniqueness.
"I could no longer find the sense of continuing to do these long tasting menus conceived mainly for the purpose of impressing the public, to follow the fashion and media growth of the chef's profession. I wanted to find real meaning in my cooking. One day I was watching a documentary on Steve Jobs, who was one of the greatest innovators of the last 30 years. I thought that after all he didn't invent anything new, just like in the kitchen, but what Jobs teaches is that what you can do is to look at things from a different point of view than the masses. And do it in a way that makes sense. Moving vegetables to the centre of the experience and serving protein, be it meat or fish, as a side dish makes sense for different reasons. Upsetting the classic balance of the table where meat and fish play the main role responds to the need of an era, of a lifestyle where we no longer need protein, especially meat, in such large quantities. It is a choice that responds to nutritional and health needs, but also to environmental needs, to an indispensable ethic of sustainability'.
If vegetables become the main protagonists, there is another ingredient that Mandura has not forgotten: tradition.
He is a chef who has gone far, in Italy and abroad, to build up his experience, but it is his roots that he has made a strength. Thus the 'vegetable at the centre' dishes are classics simply revisited and reworked. And once again simple does not mean easy. Because as Christian himself says 'it would be easier to bring lobster, peas and passion fruit to the table and be told by diners that it is good. Because nobody at home prepares such a dish; this is a dish designed and prepared solely to impress. At the Unforgettable Instead, we want our guests to have a cultural background for reference and comparison. Everyone knows trifle courgettes, tagliolini with mushrooms or caramelised onions. It is only by serving these dishes, reworked by shifting the focus to vegetables and accompanying them with a side dish of protein, that diners can really evaluate and appreciate our proposals'.
Dishes that use few ingredients, sometimes only one or two, to give maximum expression to the vegetables. A concept and workmanship born of genius and passion.
"When you order the roast pepper,' explains the chef, 'on the plate you find only the pepper. It's a concept we call the Italic eye, which allows us to enter the third dimension of the material and bring out its flavour. We don't use a single gram of salt in the vegetables, because we think that taste lives inside the material and there is no need to use salt. We do not exclude it in meat and fish, but in vegetables we do, and we go about developing sensations that confuse the palate so that it does not perceive the lack of salt. An example is the tuna and artichoke sandwich. The artichoke is one hundred per cent of the experience, served with a tuna pate as a side dish and with tramezzino bread. The artichoke is cooked in a pot in grape seed oil flavoured with horseradish, which gives the artichoke a very balanced spiciness. The dish is then finished with oregano and thyme leaves and a grating of fresh horseradish. Why horseradish? Because it has its own spiciness that the moment you put the artichoke in your mouth the palate is confused by the spicy part. Or there is cauliflower gratin, which has liquorice inside, which gives a bitter perception. In the dishes we always develop a spicy or bitter part, which confuses the palate and does not make it feel the lack of salt. This working methodology, the Italic eye, consists of three elements: creativity, taste and technique. Creativity is synthesis achieved through lateral thinking; for taste, the claim is: in the third dimension of matter lives taste, hence the reason for not using salt. Finally, I always say that technique leaves room for the idea, resulting in childish cooking. Where the term childish takes on a positive meaning and also means intuitive'.
The creativity of Christian Mandura today is, as Steve Jobs teaches, to look at raw materials and traditional dishes in a different way. Without extravagance, he says, but certainly not without genius. One example above all is his trifoliated courgette. The courgette is peeled and dried for six hours; a powder is made from the peel, with which, together with parsley powder, the skin is reconstructed to cover the courgette again, cooked in butter and micro-perforated so that the butter penetrates inside.
A courgette arrives on your plate looking completely raw and yet to be peeled, but when you mash it, the butter makes its explosive exit and the texture of the skin makes the taste, unexpected to the eye, of parsley explode on your palate.
And here is the Unforgettable, unforgettable!
Ph. Credits: Chiara Schiaratura, Stefano Macinelli
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