Spaghetti frutti di mare
Piccola Trattoria (Torrecilla del Leal street, 15) is in a corner where you have probably never stopped. Near Anton Martin, there's construction going on next door and the front door is so discreet that parked cars hide it if you don't look out on purpose. Giuseppe, (Bitonto, Bari, 1964), its owner, opened this small shop in September 2016, With Wake, his current partner, Argentina, after a life of comings and goings in the world of cooking.
Pino, as everyone knows him, exudes italianita. He likes himself and is proud of what he has achieved. He defines his greatest achievement as being able to do something he dreamed of and get a career in gastronomy without a diploma. He hates getting up early and if you ask him what Piccola Trattoria is, he answers quickly: "the third child I never had."
Heads of garlic hung above its charming bar
Pino and Estela are that explosive mixture of roots, character and personality, which is perceived from the moment you set foot in the door. Book by phone because if not, you will have it complicated.
Estela will welcome you with a smile and she will quickly serve you your first drink and a snack. From there the magic begins because the place is so small that you constantly confuse if you are in the kitchen of someone's house or if you have really gone out to dinner. Pino will show you the dishes off the menu, he will probably convince you to try something of the day. Do it. He will also end up expanding on some episode of his life.
Green walls, four or five high tables to facilitate space, a bar with hanging heads of garlic, vases and glasses. The music, always Italian, somewhat popera, acts as the perfect opening act for the feast. Pictures of Loren and other celebrities eating pasta are scattered on the walls. At the end of a small corridor is the kitchen, with the door open, where you see Pino appear and disappear loaded with ingredients.
Music, always Italian
THE EUROPEAN BEGINNINGS
While writing the last dish of the day on the blackboard, Iberian secret with sautéed mushrooms and apple, Pino tells me that it was part of a family of nine siblings in southern Italy and he began to cook almost by force, since he can remember, pushed by his mother, that she needed help to feed them all each day.
Mussels, Giuseppe's specialty
A frustrated percussionist, he decided to devote his life to his other great passion: the kitchen. At 17 years old, he realized that in his country there were not many options to learn and succeed if he was a boy from the south, and a friend of his encouraged him to venture on a trip to Frankfurt. Once there, he did the tests to enter a giant restaurant, but luxurious - he points out - in the city, and they took him as second chef's assistant
His progression was such that they proposed scholarship training in Lyon with Paul Bocuse. And he went to those kitchens in the 70s to launch his career: “I learned a lot, but it was constant pressure. You had to change the menu every month, constantly innovate. They trained creators”, Pine points out.
After coming to a sudden stop when his mother died —il suo dolore più grande de el, as he himself defines—, he could not stay in Italy because in Puglia at that time haute cuisine did not exist and the north was full of restaurants where it was impossible to enter coming from the heel of the boot.
Eggplant parmigiana
A PUGLIESE IN SPAIN
He returned to Frankfurt to become chef de cuisine. There, the good prospects in his career also led him to realize that living to cook prevented her from having free time and enjoying his youth.
When some friends suggested he come to Spain, it was the year 90, he wanted to try it on vacation first. His friends called our country the new world. “I landed in Madrid one week in April and I couldn't leave anymore”. He was a crush.
he met Martin Berasategui at the time of his amparo restaurant, Puigcerdà street, because he opened on the same street, along with a partner, La Cassina, a tiny Italian restaurant with French touches. "On top of the premises were the offices of Pedro Almodóvar," he relates, an accomplice of the Madrid show business of those years.
His personal ups and downs took him to a restaurant with friends in Las Rozas, to cook in private homes and to end up feeding Rajoy himself at Il Borsalino, his own restaurant that he opened behind the Congress.
Pino boasts of having the former president among his first clients: “Mariano Rajoy ate two plates of spaghetti with garlic and chilli. Like I did, with a bit of mint." He ended up returning to Las Rozas and there he opened the Trattoria da Pino, but a sentimental separation made him turn around again.
Burrata
THE PICCOLA TRATTORIA
After the emotional complications came tranquility. “A friend called me and said: Pino, I have a place in Lavapiés, in a cool place, where you know you can find everything . You have to see it".
Red tuna tartare
“When I got here, I went in and left. It was horrible.” But at that moment Estela, his current partner and his companion at the Piccola, pushed him to visualize, to see beyond. And it was how she began to shape what she wanted that it was like the kitchen of a house: his. The idea was always that anyone who entered for the first time, left with a smile saying "I'll be back". They work with four tables, arranged for fun.
“It is the place that I have always dreamed of going to eat and that I never find”, Pin points out. “Sometimes I have thought about taking a bigger place… but I don't think so”.
Pino and Estela talk about caring, pampering. To make you feel at home.
truffle pizza
THE PINE KITCHEN
Pino cannot conceive of cooking without innovating. As he himself states when asked: cooking is an art. "Always I have been a perfectionist all the dishes before going outside have to be impeccable. If not, it's like going out in the street in a suit without ironing”.
When I ask him what his cooking is like: “I've never wanted to be expensive, I've always fought to be the novelty. The novelty of being able to eat like in a Michelin Star but spending 30 or 40 euros”, he answers me convinced.
Good appetite!
If I had to choose a dish, it would be the gorgonzola and pear fagottini with truffle and boletus sauce with crushed almonds, flambéed with amaretto and cream. Parmigiano is added and the chef's secret that “will never come out”.
Sounds like a dance in a version by Umberto Tozzi and Raf. ** “Now you are going to eat”, he tells me. Let the dance begin. **