BRESCIA – “My job is also outside the kitchens: passing on the millenary wisdom of Italian gastronomy is my life. Because good food brings people together, helps to find common points of view, helps to be happy”. This is how he presented himself on Identità Golose in his profile, this was his cooking philosophy. He was not a “chef star” but he was a great chef Vittorio Fusari, who died at the age of 66 in a hospital in Chiari, where he had been hospitalized for a few days following a stroke. An embolism that hit him late in the morning killed him.
Son of a railway worker – and in his turn stationmaster in his youth – Fusari had studied philosophy, but then had opened his first restaurant on Face of Iseo in 1981, a tavern he had created and which, among the first if not the first in Italy, combined haute cuisine with a relaxed and relaxing environment. From Face the were born Masks, a signature cuisine restaurant, only to return in 1995 to its first experience, to its Iseo tavern. Then the important Milanese parenthesis to Pont de Ferr, from 2015 to 2017 and the return to Franciacorta, of which Fusari was a symbol in the kitchen, in Adro with the Pantry Bread and wines.
The latest experience in Bergamo with the restaurant Balzer, historic city bar, which with Fusari has become a symbol of conviviality and food community. “Here – he said with pride – preparations, additives and preservatives are prohibited for the benefit of fresh raw materials, local biodiversity, products from organic agriculture”.
It is right for him to underline the mission he often repeated: “We must nourish not only the body but also the spirit”, as he put into practice in the recent book Happiness tastes like health edited by Slow Food written in collaboration with prof. Luigi Fontana. It was his invitation to return to the kitchen, in a world of fast food and delivery, a hymn to the market, to producers, to farmers, a proposal to try self-production, to recover that knowledge of food that is fundamental for our health and that of the environment. Because, he said, our relationship with nutrition and above all the awareness of how food reaches us can guarantee health and longevity as and more than a diet. It is no coincidence that Carlo Petrini had named him a meritorious gastronomy.
Do you want to be happy? Go back to the kitchen (after shopping at the market)
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That’s why he was considered a master of life as well as a great cook, and he was loved in the environment for his frank and lively character, but never in the spotlight.
Enzo and Paolo Vizzari wrote: “Too little is said about him, a humble cook with a good gaze who at the beginning of the 80s invented the legendary Face in Iseo, the meeting place of the pioneers of Franciacorta where, alongside the loyal calycists, the first curious ones landed attracted to the area by small and promising wineries such as Bellavista or Cà del Bosco. A passage in the brigade of Gualtiero Marchesi then made Vittorio change his way of thinking about the kitchen, and since then his ideas have no longer remained firm, filtered through ever new stimuli and openings of various kinds “.
His grilled lamb with pecorino sauce, almonds and gin
Among his mythical dishes, one of all is the potato puff pastry with caviar destined to enter the catalog of masterpieces of Italian cuisine and which united his popular soul like no other with his love for refined products and great cuisine. But also his beef in oil, the tradition betrayed. Or the duck in cabbage, with chestnut cream and duck liver pralines wrapped in anchovies and cabbage, is a dish dedicated to the patron saint of Lake Iseo, San Vigilio. These are just some of the recipes that earned him the Michelin star, in 1992, preserved until 2007.
He was also a great connoisseur and passionate about wines, he drank very well in his premises. But the cuisine and the culture of food, for whose diffusion he worked so much, were his second passion. Before that, he even started the family. When, after three years of happy collaboration with Maida Mercuri, he left Pont de Ferr, he explained: “I love this job deeply but today I know that I am called elsewhere and I know that I must postpone it to the family, to my son, to my wife, to their and my needs. Because my inspiration is also nourished by them “. Fusari leaves his wife Anna Patrizia Ucci and a 15 year old son.
Pont de Ferr wishes, 30 years of emotions in the kitchen (and in the glass)
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