The first episode of the first season of the genre-redefining streaming series Chef’s Table on Netflix begins, as one might expect, in Italy. Massimo Bottura, the omnipresent, award-winning, and much-celebrated chef who was then simply famous and now runs a global gastronomic empire, is the star, also as one might expect. What is unexpected, however, is where the story begins: not in Bottura’s wildly successful, three-Michelin-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana, but with an earthquake—a real one, not a metaphor.
In 2012, a powerful quake visited terrible damage on the city of Modena, Bottura’s home and host to his restaurant. We see buildings crumble, sirens wail, and clouds of dust and debris obscure the lens. Then we see the Parmigiano—shelves upon shelves of perfect straw-colored spheres collapsing under the weight of themselves, cascading onto the ground, smashing open to reveal the crags and crevices that only years of aging can achieve, now left exposed and vulnerable. Many millions of euros and hundreds of local jobs hang in the balance.
With swift footwork, Bottura activates his celebrity to focus the world’s attention on the tragedy in Modena. He reimagines the classic, beloved, and easy-to-execute Roman spaghetti cacio e pepe—swapping out the southern dried durum wheat pasta for northern arborio rice, and Laziale pecorino for Emilian Parmigiano Reggiano—to create a new recipe: risotto cacio e pepe. Then, he invites the world to cook rice with cheese. In short order, all the damaged Parmigiano is sold, and thousands of people, within and beyond Italy, are eating it together in solidarity.
