Chef Elena Marchetti: "A Dish Without Memory Is Just Food"

Elena Marchetti is not what you expect. Two Michelin stars, a restaurant in Rome that has been fully booked for three years, a cookbook that sold 200,000 copies — and yet she answers the door to her Trastevere apartment in paint-stained jeans and bare feet, carrying a glass of Vermentino. "I was painting," she says, gesturing at a canvas in the corner. "I always paint on my days off. It is the only thing that uses the same part of my brain as cooking."

We sit at her kitchen table — a vast slab of Carrara marble that she tells me belonged to her grandmother — and she pours me a glass of wine. The kitchen is extraordinary: a professional range, yes, but also jars of preserved lemons, bundles of dried herbs, a bowl of truffles from Norcia that she bought at the market this morning. It smells like the best version of Italy.

"I grew up in Umbria," she begins, without prompting. "My mother was a good cook, but my grandmother was a great one. She cooked the way people cooked before cooking became a performance. Everything from the garden, everything in season, nothing wasted. I didn't understand it then — I thought it was just poverty. Now I understand it was philosophy."

The philosophy is evident in her cooking. Her restaurant, Osteria Barberini, serves what she calls "memory food" — dishes that are technically precise but emotionally direct. Her signature pasta al tartufo is made with a dough that takes three days to prepare, but it tastes like something your grandmother might have made on a Sunday, if your grandmother had been a genius.

"The hardest thing I have had to learn," she says, refilling my glass, "is that restraint is not the same as simplicity. Restraint is a choice you make after you have understood everything. Simplicity is what you have before you understand anything. My grandmother was simple. I am trying to be restrained. There is a difference." She pauses. "I am not sure I have got there yet."