Filippo La Mantia
by Alessandro Apolito

Filippo La Mantia, having led an incredibly adventurous life
- during which he worked as a press photographer
in Palermo back in the Eighties - moved to Rome in 2001.
In an ethnic and reserved environment, featuring an open-plan kitchen,
Filippo supervises every dish, monitors every course,
and attends to every guest, with his chef’s expertise
and his restaurateur’s savoir faire.

“Filippo’s kitchen is a grove of citrus fruits.
If you close your eyes, the scent of oranges and lemons
subtly recreates Sicily as a fragrance. Sicilian cooking
is synonymous with taste and variety. La Mantia has learned
the lesson proffered by tradition, choosing to rely
on the most typical dishes, while distancing himself from
the stereotype of Sicilian cuisine.
Lightness. This word epitomizes his choice: the application
of a subtraction which is not mathematical, but gastronomic.
A choice which signals his love for the aromatic zest brought
both by vegetables and the different kinds of fish that he treats,
arranges and transforms, seeking to maintain their original culinary attractions intact.
Filippo’s cooking does not consist in a mere revisitation;
it is truly creative – in the sense that he abandons
the mainstream and takes his own, original path.
Just to render the idea, he replaces garlic and onion
with citrus pesto. Lo and behold, the flavours emerge
full bodied and mightily enhanced. You can feel the
Sicilian breeze blowing down from the rows of gentle hills,
to permeate the landscape with the fragrance of orange
and lemon, filling the eyes with the golden light of the
Sicilian valleys, and seducing the palate with unique tastes.”

Communicating, cooking, tasting:
the media chef’s lesson
by Luca Zanini

A constant star in the galaxy of TV programmes
and radio broadcasts, and a much-acclaimed guest at those
salons which count, Filippo la Mantia is a born communicator.
But he is not only a media chef, he is - first and foremost -
an atypical cook who has proved himself capable of introducing innovation into the concept of cuisine by following
a road that is all his own. By eliminating garlic and onion,
La Mantia has taken a decisive step towards a kind of cuisine
which really brings out the qualities of the raw materials, enhancing them still further with the fragrances of aromatic herbs and citrus fruit. At one and the same time, Filippo’s Sicilian cooking evokes age-old flavours and leads to the discovery of new combinations. All his dishes are those of an exile, of a man who has had to leave his native land, and whose mindreturns there every time he returns to the kitchen: citrus pesto, toasted almonds and wild fennel sweep our minds, hearts and taste buds down into his native Sicily. The leading role in his cooking is played by the senses, … which evoke images and trigger emotions. In this book, La Mantia reveals some of his secrets, just as he does in his restaurant, when he accompanies his dishes to the table and tells his guests all about them.