Pizza and pasta are common dishes known in Korea to symbolize Italian cuisine. The owner of the Italian eating place, Ciuri Ciuri, located close to Hongik University in western Seoul, says Italian food is a lot greater than simply the ones.
Chef Enrico Olivieri, fifty-one, and his spouse Filippa Fiorenza, 49, run the Sicilian restaurant collectively.
Opened in 2014, the eating place obtained 3 forks in 2017 on Italian wine and food guide Gambero Rosso, equivalent to three stars at the Michelin Guide for Italian restaurants. The indoors of the eating place capabilities the ocean-like topic of Italy’s biggest island Sicily with blue partitions and homemade accessories on a fishing net.
“I desire to introduce local Italian meals and spread the way of life amongst Koreans,” he said in the course of an interview with The Korea Times at the restaurant, Thursday.
Originally from Rome, Olivieri got here to Korea for a wine commercial enterprise in 2008. He worked as a sommelier at a great-eating Italian restaurant and as a consultant for a wine buying and selling organization until he opened his restaurant with Fiorenza five years ago.
“We started to consider doing something together in Korea. That means sharing our tradition with the Korean humans,” he said.
Sicily is wherein he first met his spouse, a neighborhood Sicilian, in 2006. He was a graduate pupil analyzing for a grasp’s diploma within the wine business. Most of the restaurant’s Sicilian dishes ― together with the restaurant’s signature dish, arancini ― are made by the house recipes from Fiorenza’s family.
“We offer our clients real domestic meals (that Italians devour),” Olivieri said. “We need to introduce the nearby Italian dishes and make them more acquainted to Koreans.”
Italy has 20 regions, each with its own exclusive delicacies. “Each region has a distinctive culture and particular cuisine, depending on where they’re originated, unique flavor and way of life,” he said, emphasizing that tradition is critical in Italian culture.
When he started out dwelling in Korea, he said he became disillusioned to see Italian eating places that have been commonly taken into consideration upscale and too generalized. ““Italian delicacies have to be now not fixated as upscale and highly-priced. So I desired to make it more on hand to human beings as there is lots more to the cuisine than being high-quit.”
Its richness in taste and diverse ingredients make Sicilian delicacies specific from others. To carry out the cuisine’s conventional flavor and richness, Olivieri uses strict and excessive requirements in food preparation.
“When I cook dinner, all I think about is the great and the authenticity of the food to get them as the exact flavor of neighborhood Sicilian dishes as feasible.”
Olivieri says cooking way extra than just the food and introducing the tradition and culture of where the food originated. He takes excellent pride in introducing Italy’s nearby culture to Koreans. Some of his clients emerge as interested by visiting Italy and ask for pointers of places to visit during their journey.
“I want to act as a window of Italy for Koreans to help them draw close and to lead them to curious approximately the real Italian lifestyle,” he said. “It is the lifestyle that I came from, and it can’t be as compared with people who only try and provide fashionable Italian meals.”
Italian Fish Recipes: It is not any mystery that Italy is a country surrounded by water aid and consequently it has got right of entry to to a massive quantity and a big kind of fish. More apparently, Italian fish has a more awesome flavor additionally… Should or not it’s due to the saltiness of its waters? On every menu for certain, you will discover quite a protracted list of fish dishes organized in a huge sort of method. Then mainly at Christmas, Italians will devour a pretty large quantity of fish… And no longer because of the Feast of the 7 Fishes, which is mostly a myth, however, because they love it.
