Giorgio Locatelli's Inspiration for Introducing Vegan Menu

With the spree of veganism, big restaurants and chefs are experimenting and getting involved in vegan food trend. One such is the restaurant is Ronda Locatelli, celebrity chef Giorgio Locatelli’s restaurant in Dubai. The restaurant recently released a new vegan menu so to talk more about the restaurant and the new vegan menu I interviewed Locatelli on his visit to Dubai.

Locatelli was inspired by his daughter who first turned vegetarian when she came back from university and then later became vegan. Cooking for his daughter made him more creative with vegetables and vegan ingredients.

“My sense of idea is to create conviviality”, the essence of restaurant Locatelli believes in. During the interview, chef empathised multiple times on providing excellent hospitality and importance of costumer’s choice and to create that sense of conviviality and inclusiveness in his restaurants both Dubai and London. Chefs in his restaurants have to go through training for allergies, and the dietary requirement to make the food enjoyable for everyone.

“the worst thing for me is when you come with family and cannot enjoy like everyone else, that will be a nightmare for me.” Said Giorgio Locatelli during the interview.

Locatelli likes to call himself ethical and sensualise towards costumer’s requirements. “chefs and restaurants say this is your restaurant and people should enjoy your food. Not everyone maybe you can, but some people just want something simple, I call them fake chef. It is ridiculous; you make your dish why am I supposed to tell you what you want to eat. Especially Italian food, if you want spaghetti with tomato sauce, I won’t say no because it is below standard. No! for me a spoon full of caviar or a spoon full of aubergine puree is same”, Said Giorgio Locatelli. He added “A difficult customer makes a stronger team. They keep them on the toe.”

Locatelli believes that the circumstances dictate the best chefs and dishes. Beat dishes cooked when there was no abundance and limitation of ingredients made it better as it creates a chef more creative. “if you give everything to the chef he maybe not come up with the best of the recipes” Locatelli added. His dedication towards cooking and serving is tremendous and to serve the best of the indigents is his fundamental objective.

“Cheese in supermarkets is very bad” which made him served vegan pizza without cheese for few weeks, “as I would not like if my customer has to eat that”.

However, he wasn’t pleased about serving pizza without cheese, so he and his chefs kept hunting for weeks and then later they found a decent mozzarella vegan cheese in Ras Al Khaimah. Nevertheless, this food perfectionist worked more on this cheese and modified it to make it to the right amount of consistency and cheesiness.

“if you are making a vegan meal, you can’t just make a salad. When you sit and eat with other people, your meal should be as refined as others on the table.” Despite being working with vegan ingredients for years, Locatelli still finds it challenging as cooking vegetables and making it as fine as meat is quite an adventure. Locatelli found it exciting to work with new ingredients and try something completely upside down, absolutely new on the plate and different flavour. However, the most challenging and thrilling part was to work around the colours of vegan ingredients. To make it look more aesthetically pleasing chef used different colour vegetables and chose different shapes of plates for the vegan menu. Being challenged helped him explore and discover alternatives for example instead of regular milk using soy milk, rice milk or Almond milk and enjoy the beauty of discovering new ingredients. “Our chefs didn’t know about Tofu cheese, I made them sit and eat, they were shocked and were confused about how to work with this, but this is part of the vegan adventure.”

Locatelli was bought up in a background where if someone asked for a vegetarian meal the chef would get upset, and having to have meat on the plate at the end of the day was all people wanted. However, he believes that main reason for that could be lack of ingredients and knowledge of food which was as a by-product of war and conflicts but “we are doing better now and have much more resources."

The motive behind the Vegan menu was not just him being creative with food but also how he can contribute to the ecosystem. “We better start to think and do things”, Locatelli believe that the time has changed and we have to cut down and watch the intake of meat as it is not just bad for our health but also for the environment. “Being a chef I can’t just go out on streets and revolt, so making small changes like introducing vegan menu or any sign that we want to show to young chefs as well who are going to look at our menu and will be like, wow! they do dig vegan.”

Apart from excellent culinary skills Giorgio Locatelli’s committed, giving and thoughtful approach is what makes him one of the best chef in the world who believes that ...

“Veganism is not a trend, but it is here to stay and is revolutionary.”