FRANCESCO’S POOL BAR SPLASHDOWN

19.07.2024 LE SIRENUSE

He grew up in Castellammare di Stabia, the modern seaside successor of the ancient Roman town of Stabiae, which, like Pompeii, was destroyed in the AD79 eruption. Later, he spent almost twenty years working on the island of Capri, ten of those as executive chef of the Tiberio Palace hotel. The fertile land south of Naples and the generous sea around it are Francesco’s twin anchors. Who better to devise a menu for a Pool Bar in Positano?

Swiss artist Nicholas Party’s has turned Le Sirenuse’s pool into a striking work of art. So it was only fitting that the cute poolside kiosk bar, which for many years now has served guests of the hotel with tempting drinks and light bites, should launch a creative collaboration of its own.

Le Sirenuse invited chef Francesco to come up with a small selection of dishes for the Pool Bar, to be offered alongside the regular bill of fare created by the hotel’s executive chef Gennaro Russo. The lad from Castellammare leapt at the chance. He hit it off from the get-go with Gennaro, with whom he shares a commitment to fresh local ingredients and seasonality.

Two strong convictions underlie Francesco De Simone’s personal take on the cuisine of the Bay of Naples. The first is the credo that “everything in the kitchen starts with the best, the freshest, the tastiest local ingredients – and once you’ve found them, you don’t want to do anything too elaborate with them: the more you play around with what is already great, the more you ruin it”. As a kid, on holiday with his family in Capo Rizzuto in Calabria, he dived for octopus, which was then cooked on the beach over a makeshift barbecue. “You can do all the courses, study all the culinary techniques and read all the cookery books in the world, but they’re not going to give you the taste of that polpo”, he remarks.

Back in Castellamare, his father would come home with great bagfuls of fresh ingredients for mamma to cook in the kitchen. Francesco still vividly remembers the pride dad took in sourcing the best fish, the best tomatoes, the best chicken raised free-range by a contadino he happened to know. “What should you do with a really great tomato?”, he asks the Journal rhetorically, with a provocative grin. He knows we know what he’s going to say: “Cut it up and eat it!”. Francesco may put a deal of preparation into many of his dishes – but simplicity is always the ultimate goal.

The visiting chef’s second culinary mantra is lightness. He loves to take traditional Neapolitan dishes and retrofit them to today’s health-oriented lifestyle. This intent shines out from each of the six dishes he created for his Pool Bar ‘pop-up’, but it’s especially evident in one of pasta options – Linguine alla Nerano.

This is a riff on the pasta, cheese and zucchini recipe served in the seaside enclave of Nerano, west of Positano – most famously at Lo Scoglio. Francesco loves the ‘original’ recipe – but admits that “it can be a bit heavy, especially if you’re serving it poolside in summer”. His take on this Amalfi Coast classic eschews the canonic provola affumicata smoked cheese of the classic version, using instead a light cow’s cheese made Caseificio Aurora, an artisanal producer in Pagani, together with a 24-month-old parmesan. But the guest chef’s real innovation was to top the dish with a shrimp tartare.

Francesco believes that “tastes awaken memories, stir emotions and stimulate the mind”. This must be why he ends his six-dish menu with a selection of granitas. These are not smooth sorbets but granular water ices that in Italy are closely associated with summer on the beach. Being the perfectionist that he is, it took the chef weeks of trial and error to achieve the perfect granita di limone, granita di caffè and granita di mandorla. In the process he roped in Sersale family members, kitchen staff and pretty much anyone who happened to be passing by as tasters. It was a tough job – but someone had to do it.

Photos © Roberto Salomone

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