Floriano Pellegrino

csoriano
December 20, 2019

The new Mediterranean Cuisine

Floriano, born in 1990. Isabella, born in 1995. Two young professionals, impulsive and passionate, full of ideas and creativity, but also of the maturity required to transform talent into actions, facts, concreteness. It is thanks to their union, professional and sentimental, that Bros’ restaurant in Lecce conquered season after season, dish after dish, the attention of all gourmet enthusiasts in Italy, and far beyond. The two met while they were still attending hotel school in Lecce, then both followed their own path to train professionally. Isabella, with a passion for pastry, with Claude Bosi in London, and with Martín Berasategui and Paco Torreblanca in Spain. Floriano in Italy with Ilario Vinciguerra, and in Spain with Eneko Atxa and - crossing the streets again with Isabella - Martín Berasategui. Who by all means wanted him to remain in his team, but the call from his hometown was stronger than any ambition to be pursued abroad. In 2015 - with Isabella as sous chef, and also Francesco, Floriano’s brother, who later left the brigade - the Bros’ adventure was launched. They immediately left their mark and got noticed, thanks to the extreme contemporaneity of an approach that focuses on the enhancement of raw materials from a very rich terroir, but with techniques learned around the world, and with an irreverent freedom that, at least initially, had traditional purists turning their noses up (purists who in a place like Lecce are certainly more cumbersome than elsewhere). A new Mediterranean cuisine, this is Floriano and Isabella's declared goal: the construction of a modern and common language that embraces and recovers the ancestral memory of a thousand-year-old cultural basin. A non-conciliatory kitchen, but constantly aimed at deliberately using the brackish, acidities, bitterness, even rancid, to build experiences and provoke reflections. Isabella and Floriano know very well how to surprise. And they are already today one of the most solid realities of Italian cuisine. Niccolo Vecchia