As the Park Hyatt turns 20, the cuisine of young chef Guido Paternollo, at the head of fine dining Pellico 3 and the Milanese hotel's entire food scene, is being strengthened. A failed engineer (and swimmer), he has hijacked his design mind to three Italian and French Michelin starred, to the point of sketching out a classically-influenced cuisine that amazes.
The chef
There are rooms that overlook the vaults and frescoes of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, but it is in overall terms the whole atmosphere of the Park Hyatt hotel , housed in a historic building behind Duomo, sketched in the late 1800s by G. B. Torretta for Marquis Alessandro Fiori, that condenses a bourgeois and affluent Milaneseness, which the recent renovation has polished to perfection, squaring the volumes of rationalism in the interiors with fine materials.
Beneath the iconic dome goes another iconic, yet rectangular, dish: the club sandwich, among the best around. Then the paths diverge between the Mio Lab Cocktail Bar and the fine dining restaurant Pellico 3, which is overseen, as with all the food in the facility, by a young man in his early thirties with a very happy ending biography.
Certainly it was not easy for him, picking up in 2021 the legacy of an already well-established chef like Francesco Aprea, who has been at home here for ten years, with the stars in his order. But Guido Paternollo has never lacked courage. A full-blooded Milanese, shuttled to restaurants by his gourmet parents, but busy with something else entirely, he became passionate about cooking during high school, when he began inviting friends over for dinner on weekends. “And so I realized that I liked it quite a bit, I started following Gambero Rosso programs, such as Igles Corelli's Circular Cuisine, and reading my mother's magazines. I remained convinced that I wanted to go to college, so after graduation I enrolled in Mechanical Engineering, doing internships and thesis at Ducati. There I realized that that job wasn't driving me crazy, and I decided to pursue a master's degree in mathematical engineering instead. But that wasn't enough. I took six months off to see if my path was a different one and did an internship in a kitchen. My parents were puzzled, but they agreed."
As luck would have it, one of the many resumes sent or taken to the star-studded Milan and hinterland ended up in the hands of Enrico Bartolini, who at that very moment was moving from Devero to Mudec. "And I couldn't understand that they had picked me up, so that some time later I asked them why, and they said, ‘If you had the strength to get an engineering degree and then change, you'll definitely commit.’ It is true that I lacked certain skills, but I had already read so much: all Modernist Cuisine, Hervé This, Harold McGee." After three months he was already employed as chef de partie at the starters, before turning all the games over a three-year period, stopping long at the second courses.
It was Bartolini himself who suggested that he should perfect his skills in France. On his list were two names: Marc Veyrat and Yannick Alléno; but not knowing French, it was from the former that he started, in an all-Italian brigade. When the season was over, the Pavillon Ledoyen called him back, where he stayed for two and a half years, until March 2019. And again the Plaza Athénée of Alain Ducasse and Romain Meder, until his contract was ended. "When I returned to Milan, I thought it was a stop before rejoining Meder. Instead, Bartolini alerted me that they were looking for a guy at the Park Hyatt who had a drive and a head. I didn't feel I was up to the task of filling such a role, but I decided to get the ball rolling anyway."
The cuisine
Today Paternollo makes his cuisine, which he describes as classic and devoted to pleasure, seasonal, contemporary, and Mediterranean. “Alléno was probably the chef who most influenced me in the way he conceived the dish, centered on sauces as a binding element. Something that touched me a lot, as hard as the experience was. But with reference to the search for the ingredient, I am particularly grateful to Enrico Bartolini, whom I still draw inspiration from when I prepare risotto or relate to young cooks, whom he knows how to select and grow. In the kitchen, I am very democratic and try to listen to everyone's suggestions. My background helps me in daily management, because engineering is problem solving, through systematicity and organization. Then the cuisine in my opinion has to be good first of all; more than ever in a hotel it has to please the guests, who have always been revered in the three-star hotels I have toured."
There is no small amount of work involved, because every day the brigade redoes almost the entire lineup, however short the menu is, with just three options per compartment, a five-courses menu drawn from the menu at 130 euros, and another, entitled “20 Years in Milan,” with reinterpreted city classics. And it's wonderful to shop around town, at the many small producers and artisans nearby or at Italy's most important fish market. It is the job of dining director Giusy Chebeir to make the itineraries fit together, while Valeria oversees the wines at the moment, on the strength of a prestigious and dense cellar full of Champagnes and great Tuscans.
The dishes
The beginning is under the sign of elegant balance: a warm corn shortbread tartlet with smoked beet, goat cheese, shallot gel, and caviar weaves iodine notes that linger in the smokiness. Also delicious are the seaweed waffle with crab, sour cream and ponzu sauce gel and the other buckwheat tartlet with eggplant "caponata" and "cacio e pepe", an epitome of Italian-ness. Change of register what welcome the tempura shiso leaf with celery mayonnaise, sour cream, nettle vinegar gel and zander roe, which veers toward Japonisme. “Because already at Bartolini's Remo's sous chef was Japanese, and when Abysse was about to open in Paris, we used to do the fish preparations at the Pavillon; then on days off I often helped chef Yasunari Okazaki." Nor is there a lack of vegetable tendencies, starring in a salad of cooked and raw seasonal vegetables with their dressings.
“A dish that began as a more reduced amuse bouche, seasoned by the lime and chestnut honey emulsion alone. Everyone liked it, but it didn't lend itself to opening the meal with bubbles. So I made a run from it with seasonal herbs, vegetables and fruits, the ones my suppliers send me. There are 48 ever-changing items in all, with emulsion, a green oil, watercress pesto, and parsley mayonnaise. They can be raw or cooked, depending on the season and how they express themselves best, on a warm temperature palette that doesn't impair the leaves, plus quinoa and puffed buckwheat for crunch." Excellent then are the marinated and lightly salamander-warmed sardines, served with a melt-in-your-mouth tomato heart, smoked sardine cappelletti and arugula.
A dish with an original structure, where the pasta serves as a side to an appetizer. “I love Spanish "pan con tomate", often garnished with marinated anchovies. So I wanted to juxtapose tomatoes with a carbohydrate, which is often missing in Italian appetizers, and I thought of a small stuffed pasta, with arugula for bitterness and spiciness." The acidic thread continues in the sheep's ricotta tortelli with 'nduja and pomegranate reduction. “The idea was the taste of sweet and sour pork, but using 'nduja. So a sugary, tart pomegranate juice and to tone down the spiciness, the softness of an intense ricotta. Plus sweet and sour barbecue sauce and sorrel."
Then the sour spaghetto, cooked in tomato extraction, mantecato with oil and topped with an emulsion of ristretto fumetto and clam water reduction, clam tongues and spiked squid rounding, tomato powder and confit tomato cream. All in memory of a spaghetto con le arselle, eaten in a Tuscan restaurant with a slice of tomato bread.
The crispy sweetbread, because it is pan-fried after being dredged in clarified butter, is served with a side of chanterelles and apricot with verbena and Vin Jaune, the real star of the dish. “We started with the idea of joining a mushroom that tastes of the forest, slightly woody, with the sweetness of the fruit, the oxidative note of Vin Jaune and the freshness of verbena. Then we tried different proteins, even mullet, and a guy in the brigade suggested sweetbread."
After the pre-dessert of lime banana sorbet, the strawberry tarte fine is as subtle as it promises: just glazed with frangipane on puff pastry, the chef's fetish, it enhances the fruit, with the side dish of goat's milk fiordilatte ice cream, strawberry jelly and wild strawberries.
Contact
Pellico 3 Milan at Park Hyatt
Via Silvio Pellico, 3, 20121 Milan MI
Phone: 02 8821 1236
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