Sitting down at one of the restaurant’s farmhouse tables for a staff meal of dry mozzarella grilled with bacon, roasted pepper and olives, fresh tubasini with lobster, and his mother’s recipe for wheat cake one weekday afternoon, he describes his childhood in Salerno (just south of Naples on the Gulf);

“See, my father who was a chef, used to come home every day at one o’clock and cook because we had eleven kids and then after he finished eating he used to put the spoon and the knife and fork on the table like this and he’d say.