Christmas at the Barbieri house | The paper

I recently happened to attend a dinner at the home of a well-known TV chef who lives on a large third floor in Prati, Rome. Among the guests, a few close friends, a commentator on the Done, a competitor in Ballando and a former Scajola, now in the government.

In all this magna magna the conversation has slipped vertiginously towards the Christmas menuthe centerpiece of Santanché, the tricolor penne of Cav, a video from 2019 in which Giorgia Meloni invites Italians to consume pachino tomatoes and Parmesan cheese, Salvini’s panettone.

While I tasted a cacio e pepe on which the innkeeper had placed a julienne of fried zucchini, I reflected on the Italian tradition, the evolution of our restaurants, the incessant search for fusion combinations, the impossibility of finding, even in the most remote , a dish of pasta and beans without a shallot reduction.

And here is the sweet figure of Bruno Barbieriincreasingly reluctant to embrace the competitors of Masterchef, now in its twelfth edition, but no less uninhibited in its search for revisited classics.

The sympathy operation of the judges-sergeants who no longer yell at the competitors-cadets has restored greater serenity to the television diet of the Italians, but not to my guests who did not digest the fact that the ratings are firmly in line with the previous editions.

“Culinary badness is dead”. Before I could add “we filled the television with food and it ended up eating the trattorias, with do-gooders and it made us meaner” the blonde lady next to me, who up to that point had spent the evening sharing her ideas for transgressive television formats, he shrewdly retorted: “Evilism has resurrected on La7, where nothing is eaten”.

They say that Cairo’s advertising sales aren’t going as well as expected and that Berlusconi’s former assistant is ready to cut off some heads, downsize some programs, perhaps offloading costs further down the chain, with the generosity that distinguishes him. Or maybe he just wants to save money for New Year’s Eve dinner. Traditional menu: political clash, a grating of populism, two flakes of patriotism, a pinch of modernity.