Love for Vietnam from faraway Italy
When it comes to Western food, Vietnamese people not only know how to enjoy a premium French beef steak with a glass of wine, but also pasta dishes or pizzas made by hand or industrially.
In that "Western food market" there are also 5-star restaurants or even popular eateries with only 50 thousand VND/portion, or Western restaurants opened by "Westerners" and even places where the owners are 100% Vietnamese. Among them, there is a "Western man" who, because he fell in love with the S-shaped land, brought his whole family, brought the culinary quintessence of his homeland with the dream of developing in Vietnam.
The space has a liberal Mediterranean feel.
Meet chef Salvatore Spinali at his restaurant in District 2. The space here is not too big, wooden tables and chairs are covered with white napkins. The pizza oven is placed outdoors, diners can see the chef making the pizza and producing the finished product. Everything creates a very "Mediterranean" atmosphere.
Chef Salvatore first set foot in Vietnam in 2015 with his family and since that first time, he fell in love with the country and decided to stay. During that time, he and his friend opened a restaurant in Nha Trang as a way to fulfill his dream of creating something for himself. Three years later, he started his culinary business in Saigon as a new challenge for himself.
The pizza oven is always blazing.
"As someone born and raised in southern Italy, I want to contribute to Vietnamese cuisine a little taste of my homeland as a thank you to your beautiful country," Chef Salvatore shared. Italian cuisine is one of the most famous and copied and transformed culinary cultures in the world. This means that bringing the true taste of Italy abroad is like introducing people to a completely new culinary experience, even if they have experience with Italian food.
Luckily, Vietnam is a country with people who are always eager to explore new things, chef Salvatore said about his luck in approaching diners in Vietnam.
Serving Italian food to Vietnamese people
The menu at the restaurant is not too rich but all are dishes selected by the chef from his hometown and associated with his childhood. With recipes from southern Italy, combined with fresh local ingredients, the dishes here bring Mediterranean flavors but still have a touch of Vietnam.
Take for example the "Panzanella & stracciatella" which is a traditional salad from central Italy. This dish is so "traditional" that Chef Salvatore could do nothing else with it other than choosing the freshest and most typical Vietnamese ingredients to recreate the taste of his childhood. Like cherry tomatoes and vegetables from Da Lat, anchovies caught from Nha Trang.
Chef Salvatore is meticulous with his dishes.
Fresh seafood is also used in many other dishes, namely the "Caprese di mare". Chef Salvatore wanted to add a touch of the sea to a long-standing Italian tradition. He thought adding wild-caught shrimp sashimi and carpaccio-style octopus along with fresh tomatoes and mozzarella would give it the right flavor.
With fresh, locally available ingredients, Chef Salvatore always wants to develop more dishes to take advantage of this source of ingredients. "Gnocchetti vongole & gamberi" is a gnocchi-style pasta dish made from potatoes, eggs and flour. The ingredients in the dish include clams and white-leg shrimp caught naturally from Nha Trang, served with a homemade sauce made from cherry tomatoes from Da Lat. It is known that this dish was not originally on the restaurant's menu, but was warmly welcomed by diners.
The dishes that Vietnamese diners sometimes do not know are all famous traditional Italian dishes.
Last but not least, the most important thing in an Italian restaurant is pizza. Contrary to the Vietnamese diners' taste with pizzas that have been changed a lot in the way they are made and the ingredients, Chef Salvatore still keeps a traditional Italian pizza on the menu.
The ingredients of the pizza are very simple, including imported Italian ham and arugula grown in Da Lat. This is also Chef Savaltore's favorite pizza because it can combine flavors from Italy and Vietnam together, at the same time in a dish that is very traditional of his hometown.
For Vietnamese diners, the taste of this pizza will not be as appealing as commercial pizza brands on the market, but this is the taste of authentic Italian pizza.
Chef Salvatore is very fond of pizza because it perfectly combines Italian and Vietnamese flavors.
Salvatore's greatest joy is seeing his hometown dishes welcomed in Vietnam. He believes that Vietnamese people love and are proud of their own culinary culture but are still open to new things. This has been a great motivation for Salvatore to develop Italian cuisine here.
Chef Salvatore makes the dishes himself.
Not only wanting to bring authentic Italian cuisine, Salvatore also noticed and gradually "integrated" into Vietnamese culture. "In Italy, we like to eat each dish in a specific order: antipasto first, then pasta and finally the main course. In Vietnam, diners like to experience and share as many dishes as possible, so serving pizza with pasta and appetizers is very popular so that everyone at the table can enjoy it together. Interestingly, in the end, we realized that this approach is not bad at all, but on the contrary, it increases the experience for diners." Just like that, those small differences help him summarize and bring dishes closer to Vietnamese people.
