Identità Golose
via Magenta 18, località San Pietro all'Olmo, 20010 Cornaredo (Mi) - ITALIA
Telefono: +39.02.9362209
ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI
Poetry is a play with regulations, both aesthetes and scholars agree upon it. What may happen if the metric of the dish is given not only by (top grade) technique and (articulated, wrapping) taste structure but also by a concept marked by austerity? Davide Oldani, chef of the “D’O, tradition in the kitchen” has answered the question. And the stakes are high, because the option may free good restaurant cooking from a series of tinsels and encrustations, luxury, excesses of service, cutlery, subjection to the product, separation from daily life. The D’O opens in an humble street of Cornaredo, full of cars which are not SUVs: between haute cuisine and good restaurant cooking, play cards are increasingly mixed up.
On the threshold of the fatidic 40 years, Davide is a missed football player: “When I was 16 I played in the Rhodense, C2 series, then I had to stop after a bad fracture to shin-bone and fibula. I have always had a bent for team play and this spirit has an influence on the group”. He inherited his passion for cooking from his mother, excellent cook and teacher of good principles, who “never cooked peppers in December”; his started his professional career in Via Bonvesin de la Riva under the sign of Gualtiero Marchesi, and then important experiences abroad followed. “I had the chance to attend the University of cooking: my professors have been Gualtiero Marchesi, Alain Ducasse, Albert Roux, Pierre Hermé...”.
Back to Italy, Oldani has been second chef of Marchesi for 10 years and then the starry chef of Giannino. After an experience as food and beverage manager for an important hotel chain in Paris, in 2003 he came back to his native Cornaredo, following an hint from his brother: “Look, there is an eating-house on sale”... And his D'O, opened on October 23rd, was immediately awarded a star.
His formula caused a sensation mainly for his prices, very low thanks to his choice of simple and extremely fresh ingredients, which enhance artisanship and the hand of the chef. In the menu we find a varied tradition, going from Friuli to Sicily, technically correct without technological tenacity, suited to the target and the characteristics of the restaurant. However be careful, Davide points out, “it is clear that I wouldn’t ever make such an operation from the quality point of view if I hadn’t had a certain kind of background. I have been working for restaurants of excellent level and I learnt their teaching; only for this I could make a step behind”.
D'O, in Japanese “the way”: shall the way to a new Italian cooking start rightly from this out-of-the-way “eating-house” in Milan’s suburbs?
