From a town of 250 people in north-eastern Sardinia to the harbourside tables of Circular Quay, Giovanni Pilu's culinary journey is the kind Australians have long admired: the migrant chef who carries an entire food culture in his muscle memory. But behind the hatted restaurants and the refined plates of bottarga and culurgiones, there is a humbler story unfolding in a North Curl Curl kitchen.
Pilu, the chef behind Pilu at Freshwater and the recently opened Flaminia at Circular Quay, says that on most nights, dinner is whatever can be assembled quickly after a late ferry ride home. A bowl of cottage cheese from the fridge is not unusual. The life of a working chef, even a celebrated one, rarely involves elaborate home cooking.
That changes when his mother, Maria Sotgiu, is in town.
Maria now splits her time between her hometown of Sotza and Sydney, and her presence transforms the household. The fridge fills with calamari sauce, stuffed zucchini, something fried. Meatballs appear weekly. Her cauliflower fritti, according to her son, have reached near-legendary status among those fortunate enough to try them.
"Every time I come home now, there are leftovers," Pilu says, swinging open the fridge door. "There is always something fried."
Maria is not an elaborate cook, Pilu is quick to say. She is, rather, a dedicated one, shaped by a tradition of Sardinian home cooking that predates the island's international culinary reputation. Her methods are instinctive and unfussy, the product of decades feeding a family in a small town where the ingredients were local and the techniques were inherited rather than taught.
On a rare day off, Pilu joined his mother at the kitchen bench to make a batch of gnocchetti: small, ridged pasta dumplings made from ricotta, spinach, parmigiano and a careful hand with the flour. Maria spoke in Sardinian dialect throughout, her son moving fluidly between dialect, Italian and English as they worked. While a tomato sauce infused with garlic and basil simmered on the stove, she rolled spinach-flecked ricotta dough into ropes at the marble bench with the confidence of someone who has never needed to measure twice.
The recipe is simple in its construction but exacting in its detail. Pilu is emphatic on two points: do not overwork the dough, and get the pasta water right. He has a formula he returns to every time, built around three fives: 500 grams of pasta, 5 litres of water, 50 grams of salt. The gnocchetti are done when they rise to the surface, then given another 20 to 30 seconds before being lifted out with a slotted spoon.
The restraint he applies at his restaurants carries directly into this home kitchen. Add sauce sparingly. A little parmigiano. Perhaps a few leaves of mint. Then stop.
"You may think you need to add another thing on. Well, don't, just leave it," he says. "The more you add, the more you cover things. Here, you get almost this separation of flavours that then come together. That's what makes simple Italian cooking so good."
It is a philosophy that sits at the heart of Italian domestic cooking and one that restaurants, with their pressure to impress, sometimes lose sight of. For Pilu, the lesson was absorbed long before any formal training. He grew up in Sotza, went on to study drafting, and fell into hospitality almost by accident. The flavours of his childhood, the ones Maria carried with her to Sydney, were always the reference point.
There is something worth sitting with in that story, beyond its personal warmth. Australia's food culture has been shaped profoundly by waves of migration, and the kitchens of first and second-generation Australians remain among the most genuine repositories of culinary tradition in the country. The recipes are rarely written down. They exist in the hands and habits of the people who make them, and they travel across hemispheres in the luggage of mothers visiting their children.
Pilu calls this kind of dish "food that you put in a bowl and you share," and says it is what people should be cooking more of at home. The full recipe for his family's spinach and ricotta gnocchetti with tomato sauce, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, is reproduced below.
The Pilu Family's Spinach and Ricotta Gnocchetti with Tomato Sauce
Ingredients
Ricotta gnocchetti: 200g baby spinach leaves, 250g ricotta, 100g parmigiano reggiano (grated), 1 egg, a pinch of ground nutmeg, 100g plain flour.
Tomato sauce: 100ml olive oil, 3 garlic cloves (thinly sliced), 600g crushed Italian tomatoes (roughly one and a half tins), 6 basil leaves (chopped).
Method
To make the sauce, heat olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook gently until soft and fragrant, without colouring. Add the crushed tomatoes and simmer for about 25 minutes, stirring occasionally, until slightly reduced. Stir through the basil, season with sea salt, and set aside.
For the gnocchetti, steam the spinach for about two minutes until just wilted. Transfer to a clean tea towel and squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Cool completely, then chop finely. Combine with the ricotta, parmigiano, egg and nutmeg, season with salt and pepper, and mix gently. Sprinkle over the flour and fold through just until a soft dough forms. Do not overwork it.
Lightly flour your hands and the benchtop. Divide the dough into four to six pieces and roll each portion into a rope about 1.5cm thick. Cut at an angle into 2cm pieces, then roll each piece lightly over the back of a fork to create ridges.
Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a gentle boil, using Pilu's formula: 5 litres of water to 50 grams of salt. Add the gnocchetti in small batches of 10 to 12 at a time and simmer until they rise to the surface. Allow a further 20 to 30 seconds, then remove with a slotted spoon and place in a warm serving bowl. Spoon over a little sauce and a grating of parmigiano, then repeat until all gnocchetti are cooked and dressed.
Serves 4.
For those wanting to explore more of Pilu's cooking, Pilu at Freshwater continues to serve his elevated Sardinian menu on Sydney's Northern Beaches. His new venue, Flaminia, is located at Circular Quay. For a broader picture of how Italian culinary traditions have shaped Australian food culture, the Australian Government's arts and culture portfolio documents the contribution of migrant communities to the national cultural identity.