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AWARD WINNING, HIGHLY RESPECTED,
IT'S THE PREMIER WOOD FIRE GRILL.WOOD FIRE GRILLSrestaurants in Lecce buy it frozen from China. They
also buy dried fava beans from Morocco and serve them
all year long.” Though cooking modern haute cuisine,
the brothers are attempting to revive the romanticized
notion of Italian food as being of a place and a season, a
quality that’s been lost in Lecce for some time.
Speeding toward Scorrano, Floriano suddenly yanks
the Mini Cooper’s wheel and exits toward an abandoned,
woodsy plot. Having familiarized themselves with the
unsung region’s wild produce through biweekly foraging
trips, the Pellegrinos are planning another restaurant
on this family-ow ned 30 -acre parcel of land. This new
venture, situated around a hearth, will focus on Medi-
terranean techniques and a loyalty to the bounty of
Salento. But today, Floriano is searching for a formula
of 20 herbs and vegetables to feature in a pork dish on
Bros’ current menu. He hops out of the car, leaving the
door open behind him. “ Verbena,” he says, scanning the
ground with the intensity of a hound.
In an adjacent lot, Floriano lights up. “Do you smell
the perfume? It’s olive trees,” he says, pointing to a patch
nearly 100 years old, which smells rather like old men
do, of oil and musk. He jogs toward a skein of greenery
60 yards ahead, and plunges his tattooed forearms into
herbage and bushes, cracking off brittle branches and
emerging with a disheveled bouquet. Among the trea-
sures are lentisco, a resinous, pine-scented shrub thatwill be infused into housemade bread; mirto (my rtle)
or murteddhra in the local dialect, a licorice-like leaf
that will be wrapped around red shrimp and grilled
over charcoal; and malba, a leaf reminiscent of clover
that will be steeped in the restaurant’s water for subtle
fragrance. Floriano begins loading the trunk, the vege-
tation fanned out haphazardly. The car looks strangely
alive, as if trailing a tail of peacock feathers.
At a final stop just up the road, I see a shallow stone
depression laid out across the grass like a ballroom floor.
Here, Floriano says, his family scatters their farmed
buckwheat groats and runs horses over the top to
remove the grains’ hulls—an ancient process known
in the region as aia. Around us, hollow, wild pepper-
corns or falso pepe (fa lse pepper) dangle from trees, pink
and perky. Floriano smashes a few in his palm, and the
piquant aroma unfurls. He clips bundles of spicy wild
oregano for a lemon tart and grabs a few handfuls of hay
from the ground outside a barn for flavoring ice cream.
Back in the kitchen at Bros’, I taste Scorrano-raised
veal as tender and pink as ahi tuna, and thick spaghetti
cooked in buttermilk and sauced with stewed sweet
prunes. Floriano stands at the pass, calling out orders
for a dining room seated with Australians, Belgians, and
New Yorkers. “ We came back to Lecce to show people here
that change can happen,” he says, looking out at the room
with paternal pride. “Something new can come along.”