Med Cooking 2019 – Chef Nino Di Costanzo del ristorante Danì Maison

Few chefs like Nino di Costanzo know how to interpret the territory beyond the product, in every stratification of the dish. Crucial option in the south of Italy, always stylistically colonized by foreign kitchens, now finally in the limelight. And it is a very elegant Campania, thanks to the ideal magisterium of Alfonso Iaccarino, in the personal pantheon with Gualtiero Marchesi, and to the high lineage experiences carried out by Gaetano Trovato and Juan Mari Arzak. They allowed him to look at his own Ischia with different eyes, renewing the ancestral bond with the flavors of home transmitted by the domestic female kitchen.

From 2016 Nino Di Costanzo is chef patron of Danì Maison, where he celebrates misery and nobility of an irreducible tradition through dishes with a personal and almost ethnic style. A Campania baroque made of calculated redundancies and vertigo kept in its grip, deeply rooted in the places. But he has not stopped traveling: for example, he is a consultant for the six fresh pasta shops in the Portici of Bologna, works for events in the world of Neapolitan Kiton tailoring and collaborates with Villa Franca in Positano. Among the already established students Giuseppe Biuso, Sebastiano Lombardi, Emanuele Petrosino and Domenico Stile, to whom he instilled his values: the importance of being in the kitchen instead of on the catwalks, studying the traditions and the territory, the raw materials and their seasonality.

“I decided to participate in Med Cook because I share the need to preserve the traditions and the sea with its biodiversity, helping the supply chains of small fishermen. A work that must be done in a team, encouraging collective sensitivity. Personally I have never done any shopping from the catalogs: I stock up on Ischia and Procida, for the line and the paranza. I love waking up early in the morning to go and fetch “poor” fish, to ennoble with technique and taste”.

Alessandra Meldolesi