Via Alta, where the lamb shoulder is big
enough to feed a couple; and Sotto Sopra,
where chicken livers adorn the crostini,
smoked cheddar bubbles atop eggplant,
and even the caramelised radicchio tart
is slathered with Gorgonzola fonduta.
He’d grown up eating just about
every animal that flapped, flew or
fed in the Lombardian alps. He’d
foraged for snails and frogs, and his
friends fed pigs with chestnuts, fattening
them up to produce salami. Whenever
his grandmother made her slow-cooked
chicken, she’d cook Pavoni a whole
hen for himself, and use the broth
to make “the best risotto that you
can have”.T
o say Pavoni’s family were
surprised by his decision to stop
eating animals is something
of an understatement. “They
fucking hated it,” he says. His mother had
followed a similar diet for 10 years and
everyone thought she was crazy. Then his
aunt became sick and when her doctor
couldn’t do anything, she approached
Pavoni’s mother for help, and the family
became more open-minded about
Dell’Orto’s approach. Now Pavoni has
enjoyed the first long-term relief from
his inflammation in years.
While his diet is largely plant-based,
it’s best to think of it as “Italian-vegan”.
Eggwhite is apparently okay because it’sClockwise, from
below: Alessandro
Pavoni as a child;
Pavoni on the pass;
vitello tonnato
at Ormeggio;
a young Pavoni
with his nonna.mainly protein and amino acids. Sheep
and goat’s milk are allowed because they’re
“very similar to human milk”, and aged
cheese is permissible because “the enzymes
eat all the bad parts of the dairy – they’re
not there any more”.
Even so, Pavoni finds dining out
tough, so he mostly avoids it. “But if
I want to go to a restaurant that night,
fuck the diet.” If he goes to Sepia once
a year, he says, he wants to eat what chef
Martin Benn eats, and there’s no way he’d
skip the signature dry-aged rib-eye at
Firedoor. “I might do four meals like that,
six meals a year.” These feast days are now
a relative rarity, and they’re always followed
by a day of fasting. He might miss eating a
big T-bone on a regular basis, “but I can
live without it”.
There’s still meat on Pavoni’s menus,
but at his flagship Ormeggio, for instance,
it’s not a large component. He still tastes
the wagyu beef all’olio and the other
non-vegan dishes that pass through his
kitchens, but he thinks his diet of starch
and vegetables is quite Italian and suits the
lighter, more simplified approach to food
he now takes at Ormeggio. It also means
he’s more imaginative in how he achieves
rich flavours. The cooking liquor he
decocts from roasted red peppers, for
instance, gives surprising oomph to
roasted rice purée and royal red potato.
As for his own meals, Pavoni is well
served by a northern-Italian inclination
for pasta and potatoes: gnocchi and
spaghetti aglio e olio make him happy.
He also tinkers with curries – sweet
potato is often the star ingredient of
these extravagantly spiced experiments.
And his health has never been better.
“I’m taking really good and conscious
care of myself – I train, I eat properly,”
he says. “I need to think about what I’m
doing with my body; it has gone through
so much. To be honest, I’m often on
edge, waiting for the next random health
thing to come at me from left-field.”
In hospitality, Pavoni says, it’s often
the norm to push through pain and
neglect your well-being. It’s a mentality
he no longer has any time for, especially
as a father. He doesn’t want his kids to
say their dad’s too tired to play, or that
he can’t. “I want them to grow up excited
to come surf with me.” ●80 GOURMET TRAVELLER