Good morning!
… and we’re back! Following the sunsetting of our At a Distance podcast last December (the final episode features the author Rebecca Solnit, who spoke with me about slowness as a superpower), a shift away from our membership program to a free-and-open subscriber model (please encourage your friends to sign up here), the formalization of our editorial studio, and a very welcome early 2024 newsletter pause, we’ve now returned to our regular programming—and with it, Season 9 of Time Sensitive.
The season kicks off with the high-octane Italian chef—or, to use a more all-encompassing title, maestro—Massimo Bottura, celebrated worldwide for his three-Michelin-starred Modena restaurant, Osteria Francescana, which has twice held the top spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. The first-ever taping of the podcast in front of a live audience, our conversation was as rich and vibrant as Bottura’s “Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano” dish, spanning everything from the art of aging balsamic vinegar (I highly recommend his peak-quality Villa Manodori balsamicos and olive oils), to collecting vinyl records, to racing Italian sports cars (his latest book is the aptly titled Slow Food, Fast Cars), to dreaming up the resplendent hotel Casa Maria Luigia.
In a world that too often tends to celebrate efficiency, scale, and speed, Bottura has long followed an alternative, “move slow and break things” model (his penchant for zooming around in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis aside). And while Osteria Francescana is what first propelled him to global fame, his most impactful project is now arguably Food for Soul, a nonprofit he founded in 2016 with his wife, Lara Gilmore, that has gone on to establish a network of 13 Refettorios around the world—from Paris to San Francisco to Naples—that serve people in need via food-recovery programs. In fact, we recorded Ep. 106 at Refettorio Harlem, in the basement of the Emanuel AME Harlem Church on West 119th Street, a remarkable, beautifully designed space with furniture decked out in Gucci fabrics and walls featuring artworks by JR, Tyler Ballon, Faustin Adeniran, and Alethea Brown. If ever there were an ideal environment for embodying the values and culture of The Slowdown, this would be it.
“The chef today is much more than the sum of his recipes,” Massimo tells me on the episode. “He has to step out of the kitchen and be louder, share his ideas, and put ethics and aesthetics on the same level.” Let this be a sentiment for all of us to abide by, whatever our recipes may be.
—Spencer
