‘We enjoy meals and we talk’
Chef Gino D’Acampo with an ode to cooking for the family
According to Gino D’Acampo, what’s on the dinner table is actually far less crucial than what’s going on around it. The Italian chef, 45 – known for his tan, family-friendly recipes and a certain level of moodiness – says at dinnertime the “talking is more important than the food, to be honest with you, 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 shares three children, Luciano, 19, Rocco, 16, 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.”
His kids never really had any choice when it came to appreciating food. “My wife is a great cook, I cook, so all our conversation, all our arguments, all our everything, always happens in the kitchen,” he says intensely. The only rebellions he gets are when it’s time to wash up – but, “I have organised myself for that,” he says with a laugh. “I got two dishwashers in the kitchen, so nobody has any excuses.”
Family life is at the core of D’Acampo’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. No, 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? So if you ask me to work seven months of the year, I won’t do that, because that is not a good balance to me.”
It’s a very fortunate position to be in. “I was not born to work like a donkey,” he continues. “Otherwise, I would have been born a donkey. You know? I have the luck to be born a human. And I want to enjoy my life.”
D’Acampo 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 D’Acampo would cook for himself and his sister. Whether it was making fried eggs on toast, sandwiches or a chicken breast with a little lemon sauce, “it was a wonderful time”, he remembers fondly, and anyway “my parents, they weren’t great cook”, he adds – just as fondly. “My father was absolutely useless in the kitchen, my mum a little better.”
lGino’s Italian Family Adventure: Easy Recipes The Whole Family Will Love by Gino D’Acampo, is priced at £22.