CELEBRITY CHEF
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come from Puglia, which is an agricultural region in Italy. My family farm is there. I grew up on it, and I saw how hard my grandparents worked to care for it. And the pleasure of eating fresh produce in season! Nothing beats it. As a child, you eat strawberries and you know that school is finishing soon — summertime is coming. We used to forage too, for wild dandelion and fava beans, which you cook like polenta with nutmeg, lemon, salt and pepper.
Coming from Italy, we don’t have the veneration of ingredients like the Japanese do. But we share the same respect for ingredients. And I love Japan for it. The first time I visited Japan was in 2002 to Tokyo. Now I’ve travelled to other Japanese cities like Niseko, Hokkaido, Sapporo and Fukuoka. In fact, I was just in Tokyo in October for the Cook Japan Project (a rotating residency programme featuring more than 35 international
Tuna Belly Carpaccio, Truffle and Piemonte Hazelnuts
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chefs). I make sure to travel to Japan every year. For me, Japan could not be more different from anywhere else in the world. Yet, like Italy, it shares that similarity for the love of ingredients and the stories behind them. In Japan, wherever you go, you are told the stories behind the ingredients. It’s not just the diversity of food, but also how they handle the food. Above all, there’s the respect and appreciation from diners as well. Just like many Japanese, I get quite excited to learn about a particular vegetable, fish or meat. My culinary philosophy is simple: to make something out of nothing. Even as a kid, I was always in the kitchen with mum. I felt intrigued and had a deep connection with food and ingredients. It was fun to transform ingredients into meals. That’s our job as chefs. We are more like artisans than artists. Artisans will build a chair for someone to sit on. That’s what we do with food as well, and someone is going to enjoy that meal we’ve made. It’s hard work. But it’s a happy process. We make people happy and we get thanked every day. Best of both worlds At Art, we do our research to find the best possible ingredients, from meat to fish, and even salt. And why not share the beautiful stories behind them, exercising our creativity to use them in unexpected ways and come up with a dish that, at first glance, appears so simple. For instance, we use organic semolina from Puglia to make the pasta. Our olive oil is from our farm in Puglia, where we have an olive grove of 200 trees. We use organic local honey and our burrata is made in Singapore using fresh milk from the Dolomites.
TEXT DENYSE YEO MAIN PHOTO AND PHOTO OF BEPPE DE VITO RAYMOND TOH/VINEYARD PRODUCTION OTHER PHOTOS ILLIDO GROUP, 123RF
Renowned chef-restaurateur Beppe De Vito reveals the Japanese influences at his new modern Italian restaurant Art.
