Italian innovation

Black-olive gnocchi with fresh lobster highlights the winter menu. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Chef Samuel Zucca brings flavors of his homeland to Beijing diners with a few twists. Ye Jun grabs a soup bowl and listens.

Italian restaurant Daccapo's recently arrived chef de cuisine Samuel Zucca has quite a few tricks up his sleeves. Diners can expect some dishes not quite like what they find at other Italian restaurants in Beijing.

His Italian vegetable soup, for example, has as many as 15 kinds of vegetables. Although it has so many ingredients, the soup does not look disorderly. In fact, the great number of colors gives it a beautiful contrast, as well as a good taste.

The secret is to prepare these vegetables with different textures in a timely sequence - hard ones first, and soft ones later.

"Potato, carrot, beans and celery go in first, broccoli and cauliflower in the middle, zucchini and spinach go in last," he says.

Moreover, when the soup is prepared, the chef refrigerates it for one night, to intensify flavor.

Another example is his black-olive gnocchi - not often seen in the Chinese capital. The dark pasta has the strong taste of black olives, which combine well with flour. The idea of the gnocchi comes from the classic version, which usually uses potato, pumpkin, spinach or ricotta cheese.

Chef Zucca is from Grado, a small island in the Friuli region of northeast Italy in the Adriatic Sea. The place produces a lot of seafood, good wine and San Daniele ham, which the chef says is better and more expensive than Parma ham.

Now 39, he started cooking at the age of 13, and he has worked in a professional kitchen for more than 20 years. His entire family works in hospitality. His father is also a chef.