Bringing lobster out of its shell
Franco Gatto, executive chef at Il Baretto, on why he will never tire of making pasta
I come from Treviso, a village just outside Venice. We didn’t have a favourite dish as a family but we ate a lot of pasta, as you would expect. We ate it at least twice a day, sometimes more. I still really enjoy cooking it and it’s still my favourite thing to eat.
I used to work for an Italian restaurant on High Street Kensington. I spent about four and a half years there before I was offered the executive job at Il Baretto. I left because it was quite a small place and I wanted to move to a bigger company.
We have a big menu at Il Baretto, there are a lot of dishes to choose from, but we have a lot of staff so there’s always someone here in the morning to make fresh pasta. Most dishes we serve are from southern Italy and we’ve tried to keep them very simple. For me, it’s all about the freshness of the ingredients – let them do the talking. That’s how it’s done in Italy and we try and import as many of the ingredients as we can. Obviously, we can’t import everything so we’ve had to make some dishes more English than they would be, but it’s important that the dishes taste as authentic as possible.
We’re in the centre of Marylebone which is a nice place to be. It’s a street of restaurants, one after the other, but we’re still really busy. We have a stone oven that we bake the pizzas in near the front, so people see that, smell it, and it invites them in.
Lobster linguine is one of the most popular dishes on the menu, followed by the pizza and the ravioli. I decided to use sweet chilli in this recipe to make it easier on the English palate. I like lots and lots of chilli, but not everybody does so it was a way to sweeten everything up a bit. We make sure the lobster is as fresh as possible – our ones are wriggling around right until we cook them – and don’t overcook the pasta. Take two minutes off the time suggested on the packet, and then let it cook in the bisque so it coats the pasta.