The three Bioesserì restaurants (a fourth one is on the way) are bistros elegantly designed by Vittorio and Saverio Borgia, who came to Milan to study – one at Bocconi and the other at the Polytechnic – and then converted to good and healthy food. Two of the restaurants are in Milan (the first one opened in Brera in 2012) and the third one is in Palermo, the homeland of the two entrepreneurs. Certified organic raw materials selected with extreme care, a dutiful eye to sustainability in its various interpretations, and of course an excellent cuisine and a pizza made as it should be, which from sporadic proposal has become a must-have on the menu
Italo Barsanti, thirty years old, accounting graduate with a history of passion, fresh winner of the latest edition of Emergente Pizza, organized by Luigi Cremona and Lorenza Vitali with Witaly at the prestigious location of Alma – International School of Italian Cuisine in Colorno. This is an important competition involving highly talented young pizza makers from every corner of the country. The two pizzas that led to Italo’s victory were “Tra passato e futuro” (between past and future) and a reinterpretation of parmigiana pizza: “among other things, I risked disqualification due to a traffic delay: fifteen minutes more and I would not have been able to attend the final”.
Italo began his career rather late, when he moved from his native Benevento to Holland to join his girlfriend who had found a job there. “I started when I was twenty-six, I was a handyman at the supermarket in front of my house; when I was very young, I had already worked a bit in pizzerias, but nothing important. So I found myself as an assistant chef at this restaurant in Holland, where I enjoyed making pizza for myself and colleagues, and slowly I realized that I was passionate about it.”
Back home, he attended the Gambero Rosso course in Naples and took the unmissable opportunity to go to Milan and reach Federico Della Vecchia, his teacher and pizza chef at Bioesserì. From intern to sous-chef, to becoming an excellent independent Pizza Maker the road is quite short, also because Italo spends the pandemic experimenting and studying to perfect himself.
We prepare up to ten doughs, with different leavening and maturation times. Personally, I prefer a blend like the one I brought to Emergente Pizza, with autolysis and type 1 Kamut flour and 72 hours of maturation. However, good dough is not enough to make an exceptional pizza, because you need high quality ingredients, and these are often what make the difference.” Italo has clear ideas: “For me this is a wonderful job, because you don’t do it for the salary or the lifestyle, but only for passion. Speaking of which, it’s hard to find assistant pizza makers: they work ten days and leave because they can’t keep up with the pace. On a personal level it’s very difficult, because you’re always totally absorbed in what you’re doing.” Besides pizza, Barsanti has another great parallel passion: “I love making all types of bread”. When asked what he would most willingly combine with pizza, he has no doubts: “I prefer wine to beer and since I love my land, I can’t help but think of a Falanghina del Sannio wine.” His future? “It might sound obvious, but I think I’d like a place of my own, like many other young pizza makers.”
