Talk is more important than food
TV’s Gino D’Acampo talks to ELLA WALKER about family cooking, his childhood and why he hates food wastage
GINO D’ACAMPO, says what’s on the dinner table is far less crucial than what’s going on around it.
The Italian chef, 45 says at dinnertime the “talking is more important than the food, to be honest, because there’s no point having a great meal and everybody don’t talk to each other. Or everybody is distracted watching television – that is not the way.”
The D’Acampo household – the presenter and cookbook author has three children, Luciano, 19, Rocco, 16 and Mia, 8, with wife Jessica – eat together at 8pm every night.
“We don’t have mobile phones or television on or radio or anything like that. My family knows that when we eat, there is no distraction,” he explains. “We enjoy the meal, and we talk.”
“My wife is a great cook, I cook, so all our conversation, all our arguments, all our everything, happens in the kitchen,” he says.
Family life is at the core of Gino’s new cookbook and ITV series, Gino’s Italian Family Adventure. But for a chef with three kids, a restaurant empire, cookbooks to write, Family Fortunes to present, and many a trip booked with Gordon Ramsay and Fred Sirieix for their buddy series, Gordon, Gino And Fred: Road Trip, how does he balance work with family life?
“Very easily; I don’t work a lot. I holiday with my family about six months of the year and I work the other six months, so my balance is at the moment, perfect,” he explains. “I only work if I can take the same amount of holidays. Ok?.”
“I was not born to work like a donkey,” he continues. “Otherwise, I would have been born a donkey. You know? I want to enjoy my life.”
Gino dedicates the book to his late parents, Ciro and Alba: “Hard-working people” who were out from around 7am in the morning to 7-8pm at night, meaning Gino would cook for himself and his sister. Whether it was fried eggs on toast, sandwiches or a chicken breast with a little lemon sauce, “it was a wonderful time”, he remembers, and anyway “my parents, they weren’t great cook”, he adds fondly. “My father was absolutely useless in the kitchen, my mum a little better.”
Gino has often spoken of his grandfather – a chef – having a big influence. “My grandfather never saw me open restaurants, never saw me on television, never saw one of my cookbooks – and I wrote 17 – that is the only kind of regret I have.”
When considering what his grandfather would say of his latest book, he adds: “He would ever be super-duper proud.”
Gino is well aware of how different the lives of his children are in comparison to his. Growing up in southern Italy, he barely had enough money – but this wasn’t the only difference.
“I was always out. When is the last time you saw a child playing with a football in the middle of the street?” he asks, mildly furious. “When I was a boy, we were eternally on the road, playing football, on the bikes, doing some weird and wonderful things.”
He remembers coming home absolutely starving. “Nowadays you open a cupboard, you can have this, you can have that. When I used to be a kid, good luck if you get a bl***y sweet.”
His kids, he says “have no idea what it means, struggling with money, with life. I don’t blame them, but it’s difficult to inject that kind of mentality when nowadays, they got everything.”
Gino is well aware not all families do have everything, and he finds the reliance on food banks desperate and maddening.
“I think about people in 2021 struggling with food; that makes me really sad, really angry with the world,” he says. “Look at the wastage we have in food and you think what the f***, what are we doing here? We throw food in the bin; supermarkets throw food in the bin left, right and centre, yet people struggle to eat.”
Change is possible, but he argues we all have to make it happen together: “Like climate change, it needs a global effort.”
Gino’s Italian Family Adventure: Easy Recipes The Whole Family
Will Love by
Gino D’Acampo, Bloomsbury,
£22. Photography
Haarala
Hamilton.