So during this “40-ine” I have been cooking and wondering who I really am, and where is my happy place? Upper Italian (Venetian): period of forty days, group of forty, derivative of quaranta forty ≪ Latin quadrāgintā Not to mention that all this thinking came, of course, during these unprecedented and uncertain times, after being barely 40 days of digital isolation and Zoom-ing with my family in Italy, I found myself digging inside, and focusing on myself.ġ600–10 < Italian quarantina, variant of quarantena, orig. So, all I needed was to fly straight back home. Latitudinally, New York and Napoli are a straight shot from each other, both near 40° North. … So I needed to find the way home, and how would a little kid and explorer find his way home? In a fairytale he would scatter bread crumbs along the way of his exploration to find his way home, or trace his path unrolling a little string as a line to follow back … A line, better if straight home … It’s a way to keep alive my “beloved food” through my childhood. Amato, aside from being my last name in Italian means “beloved”, Cibo means “food” so Amato Cibo is just an emotional journey back to my childhood memories, to my family’s place and to the characters that played a role in my upbringing. This is how Amato Cibo was born, or better re-born. So little by little I started reproducing my childhood memories and experience in my daily cooking and, and then while hosting dinners While the Italian, and especially southern-italian cuisine I have known for all my life is simple, genuine and I would say “innocent” like a child. In New York Italian cuisine is quite often misinterpreted, manipulated and over elaborated. Then I struggled to find the flavors that reminded me of home, and I started realizing that in New York this so-celebrated “Italian food” is not even close to what I grew up eating or what inspired me as a little child. It’s been a roller coaster of emotions and experiences, dnd food has played an important role in this adventure.Īt the beginning it was an exhilarating exploration of new flavors, new culinary experiences and, of course, guilty pleasures. It is a hotbed of creativity, rife with innovative dining experiences. You can meet people from all over the world and eat a different cuisine every day. New York is the most exciting city in the world, so vibrant, dynamic and diverse. This dream became true and with a bubbling soup of emotions, fear, excitement…, my partner Leonardo, and I decided to undertake this adventure. Loving exploration and adventures, the little child grew up feeding a dream: travel all over the world and land in this concrete jungle, we call New York. This little child hungry of discovery and curious was me, little Giuseppe, and somehow he still survives inside me, as an adult, inside my early memories and my daily habits, as an Italian living somewhere else in the world, still deeply proud of his roots. Since he was so adventurous and loved exploring unknown places, he would push himself, not only to the most hidden places of the old neighborhood, built over centuries with narrow and tall alleys, so called “vicoli” where the sunlight rarely touch the street, and picturesque little “piazzas”, with his little friends, but also we would sneak inside his aunts and grandma’s kitchens, where, believe it or not, there was always, ALWAYS, something delicious simmering on the stove, or a tasty, fragrant ingredient on the counter of the big kitchen, ready to be cooked, catching his growing senses. Food and everything around it, at that innocent age, was such an adventure for this little child… Once upon a time, in the centuries-old and charming city of Naples, in southern Italy, a curious and, creative child was growing wild and fascinated by Nature, Art, and discovery.Īs not so many children of his age, he was also charmed by the simplicity of the ingredients, the standout flavors and the earthy textures of his family’s traditional cooking.
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