“When I walk into the kitchen, I say hello to my tools. I still use the knife, the slicer and the meat grinder. Paradoxically, I cut myself less now than I used to. Antonio Ciotola is a singular Italian chef. A graduate of the Sorrento Hotel School, he founded his own restaurant in 2001: La Taverna degli Archi, where he reinvented the flavors of the Marche and Campania regions. Until that New Year’s Day in 2005, when an accidental firework explosion robbed him of his sight.
Now blind, but refusing to give up his vocation, Antonio reinvents his way of cooking. “I reopened the place because cooking is my life. There’s nothing I can do about it. You don’t cook with your eyes. You cook with your hands, with your sense of smell, but above all with your heart. So it’s with his other senses that he invents perfectly balanced dishes, blending high-quality produce with unexpected flavors. In addition to continuing to run his restaurant, ranked one of the world’s 50 best in 2014, the chef never ceases to share messages of resilience, notably during training sessions with children, proving to them that“passion knows no obstacles“. And it’s no doubt for this reason that he has been named honorary president of the Federation of Italian Chefs’ Department of Emergency Solidarity, which aims in particular to set up emergency collective catering as part of civil protection.
