Young Dutch-Italian chef Eugenio Boer, the Academic Tables guest chef on Wednesday September 28 and Thursday September 29, has an impressive curriculum.
His professional experiences have taken him all over Italy and beyond: He started at the Osteria dei Vespri in Palermo with Alberto Rizzo before moving to Kolja Kleeberg’s Vau in Berlin, returning to Italy to cook with Gaetano Trovato at Arnolfo in Tuscany and then travelling north to work with the master of mountain cuisine, Norbert Niederkofler, at St. Hubertus in the Badia Valley. Eventually he ended up in Milan, with Enocratia and now, since 2015, as head chef at Essenza.
In his restaurant, Boer creates a cuisine that mixes his professional and personal histories. As he explained in a recent interview, “mine is a cuisine of memories, past and recent, in which you can recognize echoes of Holland, the flavors of Liguria, of Sicily, of a multicultural metropolis like Berlin, of the Tuscan period spend in the Arnolfo kitchens and those of Norbert Niederkofler in Alta Badia.”
At Pollenzo, the young chef will be preparing an unusual and varied set of dishes. On Wednesday the menu will start with Uovo d’Autunno, “autumn egg,” cooked at 63° with potatoes, Castelmagno and Savoy cabbage, followed by Zucca&Porcini, a risotto with smoked pumpkin, porcini and calamint, and Boeuf à la mode with aletta, chanterelles, celeriac and currants, before finishing with Passeggiata in Langa, “walk in the Langa,” with Jerusalem artichoke, hazelnuts and Madernassa pears cooked in wine.
The first dish on Thursday is Zucchine in Carpione, marinated zucchini with red onions, pine nuts, vinegar and anchovy bread, followed by a first course called Il Cortile, “the courtyard,” a white-meat ragù with spinach maltagliati, a main course called Aglio&Caffè, with salt cod, sweet garlic, potatoes and coffee, and the dessert Ricordo di una merenda da bambino, “memory of a child’s snack,” with brioche, cacao and toasted hazelnuts.
