An Italian restaurant that respects its masters

Ebru Erke

A new Italian restaurant has opened in Istanbul: Lucente. But what first caught my attention was not its menu, but the approach taken to create it. The team learned pasta-making from a family that has been producing fresh pasta for three generations, pizza from a pizzaiolo trained in the tradition of Gabriele Bonci, gelato from one of Rome’s respected artisans, and coffee from an Italian barista. Because cooking the cuisine of another country involves far more than reproducing a handful of good recipes. Sometimes, it means first becoming a student at the feet of a master.

We have a peculiar confidence when it comes to Italian cuisine. After making a few decent pasta dishes, finding what we believe to be the right tomatoes and spending some time in front of a pizza oven, we can easily convince ourselves that we have mastered it. Our beloved country is full of chefs running Italian restaurant kitchens without ever having set foot in Italy. Yet, in my view, Italian cuisine is one of the world’s great culinary traditions most frequently underestimated.

Perhaps its apparent simplicity has something to do with it. A good carbonara requires only a handful of ingredients. A plate of ravioli has little room for theatrical presentation. And a Margherita pizza has very few ingredients behind which to hide. But simplicity and ease are not the same thing.

In fact, quite the opposite is often true. The fewer the ingredients, the fewer places there are to conceal a mistake. From the composition and thickness of pasta dough to the way a sauce clings to it and the precise point of doneness; from the flour and hydration of pizza dough to its fermentation and those crucial few minutes in the oven, dozens of seemingly minor decisions shape the final result. The mastery of Italian cuisine lies less in grand displays of technique than in these small decisions that may appear insignificant to an outsider.

This is precisely what impressed me most about Lucente, which has opened in Gümüşsuyu. Rather than placing the entire responsibility for developing the kitchen on the shoulders of a single chef, gastronomic consultant Elvan Uysal Bottoni brought specialists from different disciplines of Italian gastronomy to Istanbul to work directly with the restaurant’s team.

The master invited to teach fresh pasta was Antonio “Tony” Gamberoni. The story of Rome’s Bottega Gamberoni dates back to 1964. Heads of state, bureaucrats, celebrities and devoted food enthusiasts have all been among the regular customers of Tony’s pasta. Today, the third generation of the Gamberoni family continues the tradition of fresh egg pasta. A glance at Lucente’s menu makes the significance of this training immediately apparent: Fettuccine with butter and Parmesan, porcini mushroom gnocchi, ricotta-filled ravioli, spaghetti with bottarga, cavatelli with pesto, lasagna and mafaldine with meat ragù.

This is a repertoire that does not regard pasta merely as a carbohydrate vehicle for sauce. Gnocchi demands one kind of understanding of dough; filled ravioli requires another. The texture of cavatelli and the relationship fettuccine develops with its sauce are entirely different matters. One of the simplest dishes on the menu, Pasta Doppio Burro di Tony, seems to me a particularly eloquent expression of this philosophy: Fettuccine, butter and Parmesan. Nothing more.

And this is where Italian cuisine reveals its unforgiving side. In a dish built around just three components, there is nowhere to hide if the pasta is not good enough. The texture of the dough, the precision of the cut, the degree of cooking, the way the butter envelops the pasta, the emulsion it forms with the cheese — everything is exposed. You can learn a recipe from the internet. But you cannot learn the touch of a master’s hand from a screen. I believe what Tony Gamberoni has truly passed on to Lucente is not so much a fettuccine recipe as this tacit knowledge, acquired through the hands.

Alessandro Ruver, who came to teach pizza-making, represents another lineage of craftsmanship. A pizzaiolo who spent years working alongside Gabriele Bonci, one of the leading figures in contemporary Roman pizza, Ruver brings expertise in high-hydration doughs, long fermentation and an extraordinary attention to the dough itself. The menu includes options such as Margherita with stracciatella, pizzas topped with ragù or mushrooms and Quattro Formaggi alla Turca, which opens a small door to Turkish cheeses. The latter is particularly interesting. In selecting ingredients, Elvan chose outstanding local alternatives whenever Italian ingredients of the desired quality were unavailable. Replacing an ordinary ricotta with fresh lor cheese delivered daily from Ayvalık, for example, illustrates the philosophy rather well.

Gelato training was entrusted to Marco Radicioni, founder of Otaleg in Rome. And I think Lucente’s decision here speaks volumes. There are not twenty varieties on the gelato menu. There are just three: Pistachio, olive oil and vanilla. I like that. After all, Radicioni’s approach centers on allowing the raw ingredient to express itself with the greatest possible clarity. I am already curious about the seasonal gelato flavors that will follow.

For coffee, the restaurant worked with award-winning barista Gianni Olimpo. I consider this detail every bit as important as the pasta. Because, for me, espresso is inseparable from the experience of dining at an Italian restaurant. A panna cotta or tiramisu arrives at the table, followed by a poorly extracted espresso made with excessively roasted beans, and suddenly an otherwise beautifully composed meal ends on a disappointing final note.

Looking at the menu as a whole, I also see that Lucente is not afraid of the classics. Creating a menu like this is, in fact, a risk. Because a classic dish can sometimes be even more unforgiving than a creative one. Perhaps this is where Lucente’s respect for its masters acquires its deepest meaning. The team has not attempted to reinvent Italian cuisine. First, they wanted to learn to speak its language properly.

Elvan Uysal Bottoni brought the right masters to Istanbul and orchestrated this transfer of knowledge. Tony Gamberoni taught the feel of pasta-making; Alessandro Ruver, the behavior of dough; Marco Radicioni, the integrity of ingredients in gelato; and Gianni Olimpo, the finer points of coffee. Now the responsibility for bringing all that knowledge together rests with Aykut Doğanok and his team.

And to me, that is what makes Lucente worthy of praise at this stage. Not a declaration that every dish it serves is flawless, but the seriousness with which it has approached the creation of its
kitchen.