A delectable journey
Stanley Tucci’s negroni found him a new audience, now comes a food show, writes Yvonne Villarreal.
It’s 5 o’clock somewhere – London, to be exact – and Stanley Tucci isn’t in a fitted shirt pumping a cocktail shaker.
But he is talking about how he almost threw his back out trying to lift a 40-kilogram wheel of Parmigiano so he could cut it into two moons, hollow out one of them, and make carbonara inside of it.
Same Tucci, different flex. Looking distinguished in a black turtleneck and matching thick-framed eyewear, the 60-year-old actor is videochatting from the backyard studio of the London home where he and his family have been riding out most of the past year. Like the rest of us, he’s grown used to these sorts of virtual conversations – except his extra screen time has earned him a spot in the club of unexpected quarantine social media stars, alongside Patti LuPone, Leslie Jordan, and husband-and-wife duo Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody.
In April last year, a few weeks into America’s initial national isolation, Tucci posted on his Instagram account a threeminute video of himself shaking a negroni. The internet drank it up. And more cocktail content, obviously, followed.
But his life has been consumed of late by Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, a sixpart travelogue series on CNN (which begins screening in New Zealand at 11pm tonight) in which the culinary enthusiast roams different regions of his ancestral homeland to learn about local cuisines, and chums it up with locals and speaks enough Italian to make ItalianAmerican chef Giada De Laurentiis beam.
Best known for his roles in films like The Lovely Bones, Julie & Julia and The Devil Wears Prada, everyone’s favourite character actor has, through the years, sought to nourish his passion for food.
He has released two familycentric cookbooks, The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table: Cooking With Family and Friends. And while he’s been approached several times about doing a cooking show, he says it never felt like the right thing for him.
Hatched from a flurry of notes he scribbled about a dozen years ago, Searching for Italy was, he says, ‘‘more right’’.
‘‘If I wanted to cook something I could do that – like I do in one episode,’’ he says. ‘‘But really, I’m more interested in talking to people who cook, and being the liaison between the chef, or the home cook, and the audience. Because I’m somewhere in between.’’
Tucci visited six regions in Italy, stopping in Naples, Rome and Florence. Production on the six episodes was scattered.
He shot two episodes in 2019 before pausing to film Supernova, starring opposite Colin Firth as a novelist in his 60s who is suffering from early onset dementia (a performance that’s been lauded by critics).
He then shot two more episodes before the pandemic hit, and resumed production on the final two as things were winding down from the first lockdown.
Arriving at a time when people ache to travel, the opening minutes of the premiere
episode comes with an acknowledgment from Tucci that it was filmed during the summer of last year, just months after Covid-19 devastated the country.
‘‘It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago the first wave of Covid-19 had emptied the streets of Naples, and Italy was in lockdown,’’ he says in the voice-over.
‘‘Thankfully, I’ve arrived during a brief moment of normality: Restaurants are open and masks are not required outside. We’ll be sticking to the local rules.’’
From there, the delectable journey begins. He’ll take you
along as he visits Michelin-rated pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia to learn the art of making a pie – including the importance of genuine San Marzano tomatoes – or walk you through how
Italians fought Mussolini’s oppression through pasta, or offer titbits about the Medici family while he ventures out for a grilled fiorentina steak.
‘‘Obviously, the first episodes before the pandemic were much easier,’’ says Tucci, who shares that he had Covid-19 and lost his taste for five days. ‘‘After the pandemic, it was harder, but it was incredible to see the resilience of the Italian people.
‘‘And they are indefatigable –
I mean, if we just look at their history, how many different invasions they have lived through, how many different plagues they have lived through, they figure it out.
‘‘And they still make it work. They are incredibly selfsufficient and incredibly inventive.’’
As we talk, Tucci mentions that he and his wife, Felicity Blunt, are planning to make a simple dinner later in the evening: spaghetti alle vongole with some ‘‘beautiful’’ clams they procured.
‘‘It’s the easiest dish in the world, but there’s something that just makes you want to be in Italy by the seaside. And of course we’re not, we’re in freezing cold London. But it’s a little gesture towards hope.’’
He says he has a tendency to be impatient in the kitchen. And he’ll admit he’s hardly a refined cook, nor is he someone who reviews a recipe before getting to work on a dish. ‘‘I’m terrible. I’ll look at it, I go, ‘Oh yeah, I know how to do that’,’’ he says. ‘‘Sometimes it works, and other times I go, ‘Why didn’t I follow the recipe?’’’
Tucci grew up in a family where people were cooking all the time. But it wasn’t until making Big Night – the 1996 film he co-wrote, co-directed and starred in about Italian brothers who open a restaurant along the 1950s Jersey shore – that his food obsession really took shape.
For the film, he shadowed famed maestro of Italian cuisine Gianni Scappin, who he says was central to igniting that appreciation. The two later collaborated on 2012’s The Tucci Cookbook.
‘‘I never really was a particularly good cook – I could cook certain things, but really, not much,’’ he says. ‘‘But once I went into Gianni’s kitchen, and I really started to understand what went into so many different dishes – besides my parents’ dishes – and the rigorous work that has to happen, it was fascinating.
‘‘When I coupled that with my mother’s rigorous work, and my grandmother’s rigorous work, and then the work of a person who grew up in a family not dissimilar to mine, but then became a professional chef, it was amazing. It was this conjoining of imagination and prowess, and it was just so exciting to me.
‘‘I really thought, after the movie, ‘Well, I’ll keep cooking, and I’ll keep learning’. But then I just really became head over heels in love with it.’’
Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy begins on Sky TV’s CNN Channel (87) at 11pm tonight.