OBSESSIONS
34 DECEMBER 2019
Anything from Gustiamo
How Beatrice Ughi became America’s
most influential importer of the rarest,
purest foods Italy has to offer
By Paul Greenberg
TASTEMAKER
I FIRST CAME TO KNOW the Italian specialty food
importer Beatrice Ughi while fishing for anchovies
under a dome of stars somewhere off Italy’s Amalfi
Coast. I’d come on Beatrice’s invitation to meet the
manufacturers of a Mediterranean sauce called cola-
tura. She’d wanted to investigate how her producer
rendered the stuff, drip by drip, over the course of two
years from the flesh of fish that range annually from
Sicily up to Salerno. We’d spent the morning interro-
gating the owner of the Nettuno company in the vil-
lage of Cetara and tasted his colatura’s use in a range
of different dishes prepared by Pasquale Torrente in
his restaurant Al Convento. But this
wasn’t enough for Beatrice. Come
evening, she convinced a burly,
unibrowed fisherman, who did the
actual fishing for Nettuno, to bring
us aboard his boat, the Sacro Cuore,
for nine long hours on rough water.
At sea, we watched as the captain set
out ancient men in lampara dinghies,
their lights shining down into the
sea, acting as a false moon to draw
in the anchovies. We’d waited hour
by hour as the fish slowly accumu-
lated. It was just a little before dawn
when the fishermen aboard the
mother ship at last drew a net around
the lighted dinghies and pulled in
their catch. Seasick, exhausted, but
jubilant that she’d finally seen “the
whole process,” Beatrice turned to
me with her characteristically wry
smile and declared, “Now this is
really slow food!”
If anyone has the right to look
at an Italian culinary product and
announce that it is truly artisan; natural; and, in the
best way, slow, it is Beatrice Ughi. For the past 20 years,
her Bronx-based company, Gustiamo, has accumu-
lated a library, product by product, of the rarest and
purest foods Italy has to offer. By building careful and
respectful relationships with farmers, distillers, bakers,
and confectioners, she has preserved in the amber of
her catalog the endangered elegance that made Italian
food world-famous in the first place—an elegance that
compelled the writer Mark Bittman in his Christmas
shopping newsletter last year to recommend “any prod-
ucts from Gustiamo.” Indeed, it is more than a happy
coincidence that Beatrice shares a name with one of the
guides in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her goal is to lead
Americans out of the inferno of red sauce chicanery,
past the purgatorio of Batali-style bluster, and up to the
paradiso that flows from local Italian artisan producers’
true passion for real food.
Curiously, Beatrice’s pathway to what is now her life’s
true calling was anything but paradisiacal. Growing up
in Naples during the Elena Ferrante era, she watched
as her mother prepared elaborate, complicated meals PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL MARQUAND
