By Louise Galtier, IFBM student
Condividere, the new gastronomic experience
There are some words that make you dream. In gastronomy, many would talk about the famous and yet mysterious Michelin Stars.
On the 11th of March, ESCP’s Master in International Food & Beverage Management class had the opportunity to e-meet the one star Michelin team of the Lavazza restaurant Condividere, composed of Sara Peirone LEA Projects & PR Manager at Lavazza and their chef, Federico Zanasi.
We discovered a new restaurant concept, developed by Ferran Adria, Giuseppe Ferretti e Federico Zanasi, far from the typical gastronomic restaurant located in Torino’s Aurora neighborhood. Here everything is about sharing, starting from the name, Condividere, that means to share in Italian. The service is inspired by the “tickets” concept in Barcelona. All the dishes are placed in the middle of the table, allowing the guests to try them all, almost like during a traditional Sunday family lunch, deconstructing the traditional menu in gastronomic restaurants. The idea behind it? To make gastronomy more accessible.
Then we discussed the suppliers and their relationship with the restaurant, the PR strategy to adopt when launching this type of innovative concept, the challenges they faced and the solutions they adopted, and many other topics regarding the management of a restaurant, such as cost-control and many others.
Inspiration, tradition and experimentation
There are some names that inspire you. Ferran Adria is one of them, and we had the wonderful opportunity to e-meet him. The Spanish chef, 5 times “Best chef in the world”, invented a whole new way to cook – with molecular cuisine – and opened the way to a lot of other chefs to continue performing this amazing avant-garde cuisine.
Adria took time out to answer our many questions.
The first, and probably most important thing Ferran Adria taught us, is the difference between innovation, where you please clients’ desires by bringing them new things, and avantgarde. To be avantgarde is to create and experiment for your own pleasure. It’s about imagining the future, without caring about the opinions of others, who are often not ready to accept change.
We learnt for example that tradition, that we tend to believe is unchanging, is on the contrary always moving. Who knew that the first pizza ever made was without tomato?
We also discussed the evolution of cooking, the presence of technology “backstage”, that allows chefs to develop even more daring cuisine every day, and the possibility of a restaurant only using robots to cook! (Although for the Chef, cooking will always need that know-how that only humans can bring).
Another topic we discussed is the importance of the quality of the product served: indeed, clients might not taste the difference between an organic product or not, but they will perceive when a product is of good or bad quality.
Finally, we were joined by Giuseppe Lavazza, vice-president of Lavazza who talked about the family business, the success of the company worldwide, and the non-replicability of the concept elsewhere, although some recipes have been adapted to be sold in the Lavazza Caffès around the globe.
