T
he heart attack took
two days. It was
a slow-motion
realisation that even
Alessandro Pavoni’s
doctor missed. No one
saw the signs. Or rather, there were no
signs to see. The experience was nothing
like what heart attacks on TV might
have you expect – no clutching of the
chest or gasping for breath. Pavoni was
36 years old, a surfer and yoga devotee,
and a hotshot executive chef at the Park
Hyatt Sydney. And he was very nearly
a dead man.
It was a blood test that the doctor
ordered, “just in case”, that saved
Pavoni’s life. There had been a painful
lump in his throat that he couldn’t quite
shake. “You’re having a heart attack,”
the doctor said when the results came
through, urging the chef to call an
ambulance straight away.
“They put two stents in and I went
back to work,” he says. “But I always had
this feeling of the stents moving in my
arteries. It was weird.”
Pavoni was considered “the next
big thing” within the Asia-Pacific wing
of Park Hyatt and was on track to a
significant posting overseas. But his
heart attack shook him up – and moving
to a more stressful job at a bigger hotel
complex in Asia didn’t seem like the
healthiest idea.
So he quit his job and opened his
own restaurant, Ormeggio, on the water at
The Spit in Mosman – now the top-ranked
Italian restaurant in the country.
There was no confusion when the
second heart attack hit. Surfing Long
Reef on Sydney’s northern beaches nine
months later, he was suddenly shattered
by the pain stabbing brutally through his
chest. Pavoni thought he was going to die.
He stumbled from the shore and,
with help from a friend, got to the
hospital. His stents had broken, coming
loose from his atrophied arteries, and
blood was barely flowing through his
heart. “I had two hours to live.”
What he remembers most strongly is
the rising sense of panic in the intensive
care unit as his chest began to fill with
blood. He woke to find his mother and
his wife, Anna, beside him.It was two months before he was
back at work, and a year before he felt
like he was functioning again. But though
his double bypass had been a success, he
was still struggling to feel well. “I couldn’t
walk for more than 50 metres for several
weeks. I had blood clots all over my body,
then blood-pressure problems.” Something
had to change.P
avoni grew up in Brescia, in
Lombardy, in the north of
Italy. Good ingredients were
abundant – blueberries,
raspberries, mountain strawberries,
hazelnuts and chestnuts were there for
the picking. When his mother wanted
salad leaves, she stepped outside to cut
chicory or dandelion greens, ready to pile
onto plates. And the power of good food
to bring people together was clear to him
from an early age.
“My grandmother used to cook
every Sunday for the whole family, from
six o’clock in the morning,” says Pavoni.
He admired her ability to unite people
around a table. “I wanted to have that
power to make people sit down and
laugh,” he says. Nonna’s food was
good enough to render a crowd silent
in admiration.He joined the nearby scuola
alberghiera Caterina de’ Medici,
and it was here, as an 18-year-old chef in
training, that he experienced mysterious
back pain that knocked him out so badly,
he couldn’t attend school. An initial
scan came up clear, but the follow-up
three months later revealed a tumour
as big as a tennis ball.
“It hit three vertebrae, a big part of
T7, T6 and T8,” Pavoni recalls, gesturing
to the part of his spine between his
shoulder blades. He had bone cancer.
“I cried for two months,” he says.
“I just broke down. I was dead.”
The year passed in new definitions
of pain: 13 cycles of chemotherapy
and complete hair loss. “They putneedles in, I’d throw up. It was tough.
It was heavy shit,” he says. Pavoni
recovered – but his body only allowed
him a two-year probation before cancer
was found in his T7 vertebra. He
underwent more drastic surgery: an
18-hour operation where the vertebra
was removed and replaced.
“I recovered, then I got on a
motorbike and broke all the screws, so
they put longer rods from the top to the
bottom and it was all good.” All good,
that is, for three years.
“They said, ‘The cancer is back in
your lungs’.” At 24, Pavoni had a third
of his lungs removed. It saved his life,
but he wonders today if it was those
same operations – those intense
procedures so close to his heart – that
led to the heart condition that plagued
him in later life.
In November 2016, his ankle
and knees blew up with inflammatory
pain. As if multiple instances of cancer
and a matching set of heart attacks
weren’t enough, he was diagnosed
with seronegative rheumatoid arthritis.
The pills prescribed to fight it were
devastating to his liver. On a combination
of heart medication as well as warfarin
for the 32 blood clots in his left calf,Pavoni began to wonder if there was
a better – and less drug-intensive – way
to stay well.
He thought of Pierre Dell’Orto,
a naturopath from his home town.
“I really trust this doctor, who has been
a friend of my mum’s for 40 years now.”
His mother was a nurse and, when she
had an eye problem, Dell’Orto helped
her address it – over many years – with
dietary changes. So he contacted him.
Dell’Orto’s advice was straightforward:
he recommended he become vegan.
Veganism was a radical idea for Pavoni.
He runs four restaurants in Sydney:
Ormeggio, famed for its signature veal
tartare; Chiosco, which does its gnocchi in
a rich wagyu shank ragù with pecorino; ➤There was no confusion when the second heart attack
hit. He was suddenly shattered by the pain stabbing
through his chest. Pavoni thought he was going to die.GOURMET TRAVELLER 79