Local Carlow nettles key ingredient to Giovanni’s winning dish
Giovanni Mannino with his winning pasta dish that uses a nettle pesto from Carlow
A YOUNG Italian chef has won a famous Italian fresh pasta competition for a dish using nettles he foraged in Carlow.
Giovanni Mannino (24), who is originally from Palermo in Sicily, won the overall prize at the Campionato della Pasta in Naples recently for his dish named or , which also contained baby potatoes, chive flowers, peas and pine nuts.
Giovanni’s connection to Carlow is strong and he first moved to the county when he was just 18 years’ old after seeing a notice for Lisnavagh House offering food and accommodation in exchange for working in the estate’s gardens.
“I fell in love with the place immediately,” Giovanni explains, adding that he was always intrigued by the kitchen at Lisnavagh, which caters for weddings and other events.
“I asked could I work in the kitchen and they were happy with that, so I just started to cook. I was living with a bunch of guys the same age as me and we were eating junk food, and one day I said we should try something different and I started experimenting with making some basic pasta dishes, like tagliatelle, from scratch,” he says.
This sparked a passion for fresh pasta and he began serving his dishes at the house’s weddings and yoga retreats.
After further stints honing his skills in the kitchens of Kilkea Castle and Burtown House, both near Athy, Giovanni felt it was time for a change of scenery and moved to Dublin, where he now works as a pasta maker at the highly-regarded Granno restaurant in Stoneybatter.
“Sometimes, I really miss the countryside, but I am so young and I wanted to see a bit more of life. In Carlow, it felt like there were more cows and sheep than people,” Giovanni says.
Now, he feels, he has found the perfect balance of city and country life, able to jump in his car whenever he can to take the short trip down the M9 and visit old friends in Carlow.
It was on one of these visits two weeks ago when he found inspiration for his winning dish in an ingredient that is abundant but rarely used in Ireland.
“I have some friends who are building a house in Aghade and I noticed that they had a lot of nettles, which Irish people don’t really use, but we do use a lot in Italy,” he says.
“They also had some peas, baby potatoes and some chive flowers, all ingredients that I love, and I thought maybe I can bring this dish with me to Italy for the competition.”
Giovanni then brought the ingredients back to Dublin with him and made a pesto out of the nettles before setting off for Naples for the final, after coming through one of the qualifying stages in Florence.
Judges were impressed at the creativity of the dish and the story it tells of Giovanni’s journey from his home country to Ireland.
“Highlighting the Carlow connection in the dish was very important to me because I fell in love with the place and I miss it every day,” he says.
