From the New York Times an essay on the effects of the shortage of Italians willing to labor in the resturant kitchen:
“To cook is a passion,” said Mr. Hassen, now 43, who went on to train with some of Italy’s top chefs. “Food is a beautiful thing.”
Spoken like an Italian. But while the world learned about pasta and pizza from poor Italian immigrants, now it is foreigners, many of them also poor, who make some of the best Italian food in Italy (as well as some of the worst and everything between).
With Italians increasingly shunning sweaty and underpaid kitchen work, it can be hard now to find a restaurant where at least one foreigner does not wash dishes, help in the kitchen or, as is often the case, actually cook. Egyptians have done well as pizza makers, but restaurant kitchens are now a snapshot of Italy’s relatively recent immigrant experience, with Moroccans, Tunisians, Romanians and Bangladeshis all doing the work.
The fact itself may not be surprising: On one level, restaurants in Italy, a country that even into the 1970s exported more workers than it brought in, now more closely mirror immigrant-staffed kitchens in much of Europe.
But Italians take their food very seriously, not just as nourishment and pleasure but as a chief component of national and regional identity. And so any change is not taken lightly here, especially when the questions it raises are uncomfortable: Will Italy’s food change — and if so, for the worse or, even more disconcertingly, for the better? Most Italian food is defined by its good ingredients and simple preparation, but does it become less distinct — or less Italian — if anyone can prepare it to restaurant standards? Does that come at some cost to national pride?
“If he is an Egyptian cook, nothing changes — nothing,” said Francesco Sabatini, 75, co-owner of Sabatini in Trastevere, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Rome. His restaurant is considered one of the city’s most conservative, serving classic Roman dishes like oxtail, yet 7 of his 10 cooks are not Italian.
For Mr. Sabatini, the issue is not who cooks but the training — his chefs apprentice for five years — and keeping alive Italy’s culinary traditions, which he defines as “the flavors of your mother’s kitchen.”
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “If not, I’d just go to the beach.”
But in a debate likely to grow in the coming years, others argue that foreign chefs can mimic Italian food but not really understand it.
“Tradition is needed to go forward with Italian youngsters, not foreigners,” said Loriana Bianchi, co-owner of La Canonica, a restaurant also in Trastevere, which hires several Bangladeshis, though she does the cooking. “It’s not racism, but culture.”
While much of Italy’s best food is prepared at home, Ms. Bianchi despairs at the difficulty of finding people to do the same in restaurants. (There is even a greater shortage, experts say, of Italian waiters.) “It’s tiring and the hours are very long,” she said.
But it has been an undeniable boon to Italy’s new immigrants. Twelve years ago, Abu Markhyyeh, a young Jordanian, finished an apprenticeship with a Neapolitan pizza maker, borrowed money from his Italian mother-in-law, then opened his own pizzeria in Milan, Da Willy, after his nickname here.
He did well, in part because he made the pizzas bigger but kept the prices low. Now Mr. Markhyyeh, 41, presides over an untraditional pizza empire. He has 11 restaurants in Milan, 4 in Jordan, 2 in Cypress,//CYPRUS??// and franchises in Dubai, Beirut, Sharm el Sheik in Egypt and now in Shanghai.
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