Antonino Cannavacciuolo is found dead, a corpse floating on Lake Orta. Massimo Bottura suffers the same fate a few days later, killed with a skewer. And it doesn’t end there. Who knows if they will touch wood or count on the fact that dying in a literary way will lengthen their lives, the great chefs that Luca Iaccarino, journalist, gastronome and writer, has included as victims, with real names, surnames and dishes in his novel Someone is killing the greatest chefs in Italyreleased a few weeks ago by the Turin publishing house Edt (336 pages, 15 euros), a gastronomic mystery written with the sarcastic and acute style that distinguishes Iaccarino but also a clockwork plot, technically perfect, which can be read both as a classic detective story, with the curiosity to discover some behind the scenes of the Italian gastronomic scene, which Iaccarino knows well and of which he is full of truthful details in an almost disturbing way.
Iaccarino is in fact one of the most successful Italian food journalists. Born in Turin in 1972, he collaborates with Corriere della Sera and is the food editor of Edt itself, for which he edits the pop section of the restaurant guides I Cento. Among his books Saying Make Eat (ADD), Street food (Mondadori), the remarkable Appetites (EDT), Cacio&Pepe – Two Detectives at the Restaurant (Mondadori) and above all Someone is killing the greatest chefs in Turin, published by EDT seven years ago and which constitutes an ideal prequel to the current book. In that detective story Iaccarino limited his field of action to the territory he knows best, the Piedmontese capital (who knows whether Iaccarino considers himself rightly or wrongly the most expert visitor of Piole in Turin) and who ended up killed were the “very real” Matteo Baronetto of Del Cambio, one of the best restaurants in the city, Davide Scabin then chef of Combal.Zero, the owners of one of the most historic bars in Turin, Mulassano, strangled by the sandwiches that are said to have been invented in that very place.
Someone is killing Italy’s greatest chefs is an enjoyable and passionate novel, almost journalistic, in which one also willingly ironizes on certain bad habits of the journalistic environment that celebrates star chefs. At the end of the book, in the appendix, the restaurants cited in the volume are listed and there are twenty-five of the best restaurants in Italy and the world, from Central in Lima to Duomo di Ciccio Sultano in Ragusa Ibla, from Etxebarri to Axpe to Eleven Madison Park in New York, from Milan’s Seta to the Madonnina del Pescatore in Senigallia, from Mugaritz to Errenteria to the “Copenhagen” Noma and Geranium.
But in short, who kills the great Italian chefs? Of course you’ll have to read the book to find out, I’m not naive enough to spoil anything.
Know that the one to unravel the mess will be a rather bizarre team led by the sly commissioner Santamaria, and composed of Iaccarino himself, a precarious journalist, the intransigent official Ornella Pedroni, the psychic in a wheelchair Madame Gombrich, the retired pickpocket Domingo known as the Fabulous and Emiliano Ranzani, owner of Caffè Vini Emilio Ranzini, the last true Turin “piola” (this place also lives and fights with us in reality). The common thread of the novel is the career of the good waitress from the Marche Jessica de Sonnaz, the true muse of the novel. Enjoy the reading.
