At home with... Aldo Zilli

Alistair Duncan speaks to Aldo Zilli, TV chef and owner of the Zilli restaurant group. The extrovert Italian chef spends his days preparing fish dishes in his Soho restaurants, but when he returns to Battersea, where he lives with his wife and two children, he loves nothing more than takeaway noodles

Above: Aldo Zilli

Did you want to become a chef from an early age?
I became a chef out of necessity. I was starving. I was travelling the world from the age of 16 and the only jobs I could get were in kitchens. I knew a bit about cooking from watching my mum cook and working in restaurants was the only work people would give me in Holland and Germany.

What’s your earliest food memories?
How fresh the vegetables were that my mother used to use. She used to pick tomatoes in the morning, then use them to cook a sauce for three hours until lunch. You can imagine how fresh they were. Timing was very important. She had nine children, after all.

With so many other world cuisines now available, is Italian food less popular?
I think Italian food is becoming the number one choice again in the UK, both in terms of everyday eating at home and eating out. We had a slump for a while, when Italian chefs weren’t cooking Italian food. They were cooking Italian food for English people. But now people like me, Giorgio Locatelli and Antonio Carluccio are on TV showing people the versatility of Italian food.

So people are getting more into authentic Italian cuisine?
Absolutely. British people find it interesting to see that we don’t just cook pasta. Italy is not just a pizza and pasta country, we are a food culture. It starts from the sea and goes up to the mountains. I grew up in the Abruzzo region, on a farm in a mountainous region, where we ate a lot of meat. Then, we moved to a coastal part and I began my love affair with fish. But there’s a lot of diversity to Italian food.

What Italian dishes have you been rediscovering recently?
I’m currently interested in doing real rustic Italian food, so I’ve been getting back into doing slow-cooked pasta sauces, like duck and lamb ragu. But I always like to re-invent dishes as well. I’ve just devised a new ice cream based on Japanese wasabi. We’ll see how it goes down.

What’s your Italian wine tip?
Try some Montepulciano wine. It’s a really under-rated grape from Abruzzo, where I come from. It’s now one of the best reds in Italy. You can buy it in supermarkets. It’s a deep red, great with cheese and pasta. And there’s a lighter one, which you can have with a snack. There are two varieties.

Which other cuisines do you like?
I love Japanese and Chinese food. I’ve just come back from Shanghai, where I got a lot of ideas. I’ve actually introduced a few elements of Eastern food into my menu, things like teraki and soya sauce, and it’s very popular. Wasabi cappuccino with tiger prawns is another new thing we’ve introduced. It’s amazing.

You don’t want to introduce too many different flavours. Simplicity is still the key. You don’t want to end up with a confused dish, just subtly fuse different elements.

Are you a volatile chef in the kitchen?
I’d say that we’re unpredictable, not volatile. Don’t forget the pressure that is on us constantly, especially when it’s your name outside the door. That’s why you get tough with your staff. You expect perfection all the time. I can’t stand laziness, I can’t stand the slapdash approach of people who enter the industry just for the money. No-one in my kitchen is sitting around having a cigarette. When they clock into their shift, they have to give me a hundred per cent. It’s my restaurant and I have to take responsibility for it all. You can’t blame your soldiers if you lose the war.

Having travelled so much, how do you rate London’s restaurants?
It’s currently the best culinary city in Europe, if not the world. It’s because London has a food culture as such. Go to Milan or Rome and you find restaurants serving Italian food, just the odd Chinese, the odd Japanese. Come to London and you don’t find British food, at least not necessarily. You find foods from different nationalities. So, as a chef you can’t the chance to be completely creative. Chefs all over the world want to be here. They see that Londoners are willing to try different food.

What do you cook when at home in Battersea?
I wouldn’t dream of cooking here all day, then going home to cook. You’ve got to be joking! My wife isn’t really into cooking either, so we normally go to a local Indian or Chinese or get a takeaway. We chefs are completely lazy when it comes to home cooking.

So what are your favourite local eateries?
One of my favourite restaurants in Battersea is Nancy Lam’s Enak-Enak, which does South East Asian food. And a Chinese restaurant called Little House on Battersea Park Road. And there’s another place, Bento, which does great noodles.

So are your kids budding chefs then?
My eldest daughter, who is 22, is a fashion model. She’s six foot tall and walks down catwalks, all day long. Cooking isn’t top of her priorities! And you know what these models are like. They don’t eat too much!