Alessandro Maniaci: The Sicilian's Song
We had left him in the red room of the Palais des Congrès in Le Touquet, on the evening of Sirha Omnivore Nord, at the end of the last of the pop-up dinners dedicated that year to Italy. It was June 2023 and the meeting between his Sicilian flavors and the flashes of northern brilliance of Ismail Guerre-Genton still marks the memory of all the guests. At the time, Alessandro Maniaci did not yet know that he was going to travel around the world, learn French in six months and settle in Paris. But he already carried within him the conviction that his destiny as a chef would one day bring him back, in any case, to the Nebrodi or the foothills of Mount Etna, to this island that nourishes all his cuisine and whose sap makes his heart beat, even far from his eyes. Until then, it is on the slopes of Charonne that he makes his talent speak, in the micro-cuisine of Des Terres, within a band of generous and passionate privateers.
Team SPIRIT
" I hate individuality, the important thing is the team. We have to talk about the team ." The Sicilian sets the tone from the first moments of the interview. The one-man-show of culinary stars, very little for him. And he insists on reviewing all the names of the brigade: Eléonore Bastié, the second, Zoé Bédouin and Hadieton Kanouté, the chefs de partie, Makan Traore and Saloum Ndiaye, the divers, Naïs Simonneau, the dining room manager, Thomas Rooy, the sommelier, Pierre Vallès, the head waiter... an impressive cast for a restaurant with about thirty covers, and nevertheless essential in the minds of the three founders Anthony Chonchau, Matthieu "Baloo" Hernandez and Esther Vieille, as the latter explains: "We want to offer wines and dishes without concession, generous, accessible, while remaining in touch with the social fabric of the district, without sacrificing quality. And at the same time, we want all team members to be able to give their best, while maintaining a reasonable pace of life. Three and a half shifts per week for each person is the maximum, so we are doubling the number of shifts to be able to open for six days ."
Capital Transformation
Alessandro and Des Terres have found each other well. After four years at Fattoria Borello, a farmhouse perched in the Nebrodi Mountains in northeastern Sicily, where he sent 150 covers per service from a menu drawing only from ingredients produced on site, he wanted to find peace and sleep again. And to move away from a celebrity that has undoubtedly become a little suffocating for a young man not inclined to an ego-trip. A parenthesis of a few months, just to survey the two hemispheres, from Patagonia to Japan, and to see if the Andes or Mount Fuji can fuck Stromboli, and here he is taking over from Emmanuel Perrot. It took me a little time to detach myself from my prejudices about Paris," he confides. At first I wanted to impress. I thought I had to compete with what I saw put forward here and there. But I came back to my convictions and my personality. Feeding people is an act of great intimacy. Technique is important, but it cannot replace the identity of the person who cooked, the fleeting moment embodied by a dish, the exchange. A plate on Instagram is a plate that no longer belongs to anyone, that is no longer in the intimate relationship of food. She loses her heart and soul. Uninhibited, he gently changes the menu, sends Parisian arancini, puts a dish of fresh pasta on the menu every day – the day we went for lunch, "sweets" with morels, sheep's milk risotto and wild garlic – and punctuates the French spring classics with Mediterranean hues. On white asparagus with sea urchins and trout roe, he slips an almond diavola sauce, prepared by infusing them with the skin in a shellfish cooking broth. Implicit or in the leading role, Sicily, land or sea, is everywhere, witness to its deep and inseparable link with nature.
THE SEA OF ALL BATTLES
" I grew up in a hunting and fishing family. With constant respect for the living, for what is precious in each piece of an animal sacrificed for us. I don't plan to work other than with the catch of the day, depending on the arrivals and especially the seasons. Eating tuna or swordfish in winter makes no sense, especially in the current ecological context. When I was 15 years old and we went fishing with my father, we filled the boat every time we went out to sea. Today the fish have disappeared, even in Sicily. I remain very pessimistic about environmental issues. How to repair the damage of intensive fishing? It's too late... But that doesn't deter me, as an individual, from making choices in accordance with my principles. At Des Terres, on the mirror above the bar, drawn in white chalk, Albert Camus' words, inspired by the Japanese philosopher Shūzō Kuki, sound like a tailor-made mantra for the young chef who is rarely satisfied with his work. You have to imagine Sisyphus happy. Of which note. Embracing his new adopted city with his big arms, Alessandro puts his work back on the drawing board day after day, between doubt and joy, carried by the evidence of his appetite to live, to feed his neighbors and to love again and again. " I always knew that I would become a cook. It's in my nature, I couldn't do anything else. Sometimes I may have gotten tired of filleting fish or making fresh pasta at dawn before setting up. But I always wake up with the same desire to cook, because it's my way of telling my story, of saying who I am, what I feel, what drives me. »
Text by Peyo Lissarrague
Photos by William Lacalmontie
