Cooking for a few

There is one thing restaurants cannot afford. I can.

Time.

This morning I went to the market without hurrying. I looked at the tomatoes one by one. I talked to the man who sells vegetables — he comes from a village in the province of Siena, has large hands, and always knows what is ripe and what is not. I asked him about the green beans. He told me to come back on Thursday.

I will go back on Thursday.

That is the luxury I offer. Not Michelin stars, not elaborate table settings, not a cheese trolley. Time. The time it takes to do things properly.

I cook for a few people. Between two and fifteen, never more. Not out of snobbery — by choice. Because when you are cooking for twenty you can no longer feel the table. You don’t know who has eaten little and why. You can’t stop to talk to the woman who asked what’s in the sauce. You can’t be present.

And presence is everything.

I have an uncle who cooks well. He is not a chef, he has never worked in a restaurant. But when you go to his house you know you will eat something real. You know he thought about you while he was cooking. That he bought that specific thing because he knows you like it. That he got up early.

That is what I want to be, when I arrive in your kitchen.

Not the professional who executes. The uncle who cooks well — the one the whole family loves to visit because the food is good, the company is good, and nobody watches the clock.

The ingredients are everything else.

If you shop well at the market, you can make mistakes with technique and the dish is still good. If you shop badly, you can be as skilled as you like — you won’t save it.

So I go to the market. Every time. I look, I touch, I ask. Sometimes I come back empty-handed and change the menu at the last minute because what I was looking for wasn’t good enough.

The guests never know. They see the dish. But inside that dish there is also that decision — that morning at the market, that refusal, that change of plan.

That is where cooking really happens. Not on the stove.

People sometimes ask me if I miss working in restaurants.

There is not much to miss. I have done other things in life. I learned to cook on my own — watching, tasting, making mistakes, starting again. No culinary school, no brigade, no chef shouting at me.

Perhaps that is why I cook the way I do. Without hierarchies, without distance. I learned in a domestic kitchen and a domestic kitchen is still where I feel most at home.

Now I arrive at a villa in the Chianti with the shopping done, cook for eight people who haven’t seen each other in a year, and at the end of the evening someone hugs me.

That doesn’t happen in restaurants.