Lindsay Marie Morris

Giulia Civello pulls a worn hardcover book from her shelf and flips through it, revealing little scraps of paper marking various pages. It's a cookbook, and one of the bookmarks is labeled "Franco" for her father, marking his favorite recipe.

 

"What's amazing about these old Italian cookbooks is that so many of the recipes assume such a high base level of cookery compared to the recipes you see now," Giulia says as she looks down at the book. "It's just 'Cook the fruit; make the pastry.' There's no explanation of what that means. And there's no oven temperatures or anything like that. You just have to know, which I think is totally wonderful."

 

The cookbook belonged to Giulia's great-grandmother and was passed down through generations with Sicilian recipes and food traditions. Today, Giulia shares that knowledge through Gourmet Girls, a series of pop-ups and supper clubs she and her team host in venues and homes across Brighton and Hove, a seaside community in southeastern England.

Giulia's father came to the UK from Catania, Sicily, where her family spent summer holidays. Drawing from that heritage, Italy travels, and her background as an environmental consultant, Giulia serves food stories and sustainably sourced Italian fare with meals celebrating various regions such as the Dolomites, Puglia, and, of course, Sicily. 

Giulia shared more about her business and passion for Italian food, memorable events, favorite dishes, challenges, and what she hopes diners take away.

 

 

How and why did you start Gourmet Girls?

I thought about doing it for a long time before I actually had the guts to launch. I started in ecology and then migrated into the environmental sector. I've always been a foodie and interested in sustainable food and farming. 

I was always getting my grandma to teach me recipes. My grandma grew up with her mother, father, and grandmother in the house, so she wasn't actually the main cook in the house; it was her mother.

 

I worked in London five days a week, commuting up, which was incredibly stressful. I thought, "What am I doing? This isn't what I want to do." Then other things happened in my personal life, and I thought, "If I'm going to do it, I just need to do it now." So, I went for it. 

It started as—and mainly still is—supper clubs, which are a great model for me because I host these pop-ups at venues. I don't have my own catering kitchen, but I go into places, cook in their kitchens, and invite people over for an evening. Everybody sits together, and it's all very much about community. I come out and tell them about the dishes and the heritage of the dishes. But the real thing for me is cooking Italian food that people don't get in an Italian restaurant here. I want to cook regional Italian food, which is what Gourmet Girls is all about—everything from the Dolomites to Sicily to Tuscany to Puglia.

 

Many friends say, "Oh, we don't go out for Italian; we just go out for Asian. You can just cook Italian at home, can't you?" And I say, "No, no, there's so much more than what you get in your High Street pasta/pizza restaurants." And so that's what it's all about, really.

 

Guests enjoy a Gourmet Girls supper.

What makes Brighton and Hove a special place to offer events?

Brighton is a brilliant place. It's very multicultural and open. It has a very big LGBTQ community, and you get a lot of people who come down from London, love it, and stay from all over. You get people interested in trying new stuff and lots of different groups. It's interesting to see the kind of people who attend my events. You get all age groups, people who are learning Italian online, who are really obsessed with Italy, real foodies who just want to try something different, or people who have just heard about it. It's a nice mix of loads of different people coming together, who are joined by their interest in what the food will be like.

 

 

Suppers are served with stories to complement the courses.

 

Share a memorable Gourmet Girls event.

The biggest one I did was a Roman street food pop-up. That was challenging. There were 70 people, and I was churning out the Roman version of arancini (supplì).

 

Every time I do an event, I get anxious in the lead-up—that's just my personality. But then I come away feeling so warm inside because people just love it. They love that you can tell them interesting anecdotes and the heritage of what they're eating. 

I had a job in a cheese shop when I was studying at university. People would love it if you told them how cheese is made and the story about the people making it. It's just that connection with food, isn't it? It's totally different. And that's what the supper clubs and catering are all about, really. It's about sharing my love of the dishes and the heritage of the dishes.

 

Pasta alla Norma

 

What are some favorite regional dishes you introduce?

I always do pasta alla Norma, which people have sometimes heard of, but often the aubergine is so badly cooked. People try to bake it. It's like, "Get a pan of oil and fry it!" That's the way to get the best out of an aubergine. I make a really good pasta alla Norma, with a lovely ricotta salata, which I get from a really amazing Italian cheese guy in London.

 

That recipe comes from Catania, so I'm particularly fond of it. It's named after the famous opera by Bellini. As the story goes, playwright Nino Martoglio said, "Chista è 'na vera Norma!" when he tried it for the first time.

 

I also enjoy serving granita, traditionally a breakfast food, as a dessert. I serve it with a little brioche just as you would have at breakfast time in Sicily. I do an almond granita with a little shot of espresso that the guest can pour on top. When my dad has granita, it's always alla mandorle with caffè on top. It's just the most divine combination of flavors, so that's another favorite as well.

 

Giulia Civello in the kitchen.

 

What were some of the biggest challenges you've faced?

The challenge I find is that Italian dishes are based on the quality of ingredients. The UK climate is so different from that of Italy, especially Sicily. If you try to cook pesto alla Trapanese, which has almonds, tomatoes, and basil, you won't get the same flavor. A lot of British chefs who cook Italian food throw everything at it to compensate. You end up with these pasta dishes with 17 ingredients, which you never get in Italy. I seek out really high-quality ingredients to try and replicate those Italian flavors, which is not all that easy. And so I have to kind of tailor the menus around what I can get. Staying true to the authenticity of the dish is key for me.

 

Another challenge has been marketing and learning to spread the word about the events. Fortunately, I have a good family network and friends in Brighton and Hove. So my events initially were filled with friends and family, but once they've been once or twice, you need to move on to the next set of people. It's like, how do you reach them? That's been a big learning curve.

I attended networking events and posted my event on all sorts of random event websites, trying to get the venues where I was hosting to post it on their socials. That helped a lot. I'm lucky my best friend and her husband have a branding agency. They did all my branding, which was amazing. 

 

Giulia Civello adds the finishing touch to a Gourmet Girls meal course.

What are your future plans?

Probably not immediately, but I would like it to be my full-time job. The supper clubs are great because they allow me to test recipes. It's quite a friendly setting to do it. I haven't had to make huge investments financially in terms of catering equipment and things like that. The venues also have staff that I can rely on. But the plan is to eventually transition to having my own prep kitchen and all my own kit and doing much more private catering—not mass wedding catering though; I'm not interested in doing 250 plates of food for a wedding. I want to do small things, where it's still very much about the food I'm cooking. It's not just the event; it's about food. That's what I'm all about, really.

 

Gourmet Girls guests typically sit at a long table for a communal dining experience.

What experience do you hope to share?

I hope my guests will come away having eaten something new and learning about Italian regional food.

 

This winter, I'm planning a Dolomites menu. After university, I spent a ski season in Italy, where I lived in the Dolomites in Val Gardena for six months. It was a glorious experience.

 

The food there is just wonderful. It is quite Austrian in terms of its influence because where I was, it actually used to be Austrian; the border moved during the war. When you're skiing there, you see these beautiful mountains, and they've got all the holes where the soldiers would be hiding and fighting. It's an amazing place, and it's all dumplings, polenta with sausages, and strudel. It's so different from anywhere else in Italy; really hearty mountain fare. So I think that will be nice around Christmas.

 

I hope people come thinking, "Wow, this is Italian food? I don't associate this food with Italy!" That's the kind of reaction I like. It's just a voyage of discovery.

 

 

 

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Rosetta Costantino's deep connection with food began in her early years in Verbicaro, a wine-producing hill town in Calabria. Her father was a master cheesemaker and winemaker, and her mother and grandmother grew vegetables, baked bread, and made pasta from scratch. Their ability to live off the land and produce simple yet delicious cuisine characteristic of the region inspired Rosetta.

That passion followed her to San Francisco, where her family emigrated when she was a teenager. It sustained her during her college years at the University of California, Berkeley, and into her career as a chemical engineer. It was always there in the background until she started teaching cooking classes after 20 years of working in Silicon Valley. 

Rosetta had a chance encounter with San Francisco Chronicle food writer Janet Fletcher, who wanted to know more about Calabria's food and culture. Once that article, "Calabria from Scratch," was published, Rosetta's phone started ringing, and she suddenly had a vibrant business offering cooking classes.

 

She teamed up with Janet to write a cookbook, My Calabria, which was published in 2010 by W.W. Norton and nominated for an IACP cookbook award. Three years later, she published her second cookbook, Southern Italian Desserts, with Ten Speed Press, which was also nominated for an IACP cookbook award.

Rosetta described her early experiences and how they inspired Cooking with Rosetta, her cooking classes and culinary tours of Southern Italy.

 

 

Tell us about your upbringing and how that shaped you.

I grew up in a small, agricultural town in Calabria. Both my grandparents and my parents literally lived off the land. My dad was a winemaker. He had vineyards, but he was also a master cheesemaker. They grew everything, so we really didn't buy anything when it came to food. 

I spent a lot of time with both of my grandmothers, and that's really where the love of cooking started because I wanted to be with them in the kitchen. When I was four or five years old, they would let me do simple tasks.

 

I was nine when I first learned how to make homemade pasta. My mom taught me, and then it was kind of more of an "I can take care of myself, I know how to cook" attitude. And it just stayed with me. 

When we moved to California, my parents brought all their seeds, and my mom even brought her bread starter in her purse. So they were very set in their ways. It was like, "This is how we're going to eat," and "We'll do whatever we have to do to find what we need," which in a way was great because if they had blended in, I probably would've lost a lot of that.

 

They started growing all the vegetables. My dad made all the salumi because he was also a master butcher, and my mom tried to figure out how to make ricotta here. We canned our homegrown San Marzano tomatoes from the first summer we were here. So all those things stayed. 

I always tell people in my cooking classes that California was where I learned about the rest of Italy because I only really knew about the foods of my town. I didn't even know the food outside of Calabria. It's so different from my town. We had neighbors from Northern Italy and Puglia, so I kept learning. And then I met my husband, who is from Sicily. So that got me into a totally different cuisine than I've been exposed to.

 

What led you to start Cooking with Rosetta?

I just kept learning on my own because I loved it, and it was my favorite hobby. But I didn't go into cooking or culinary school or anything. I went to UC Berkeley, graduated with a chemical engineering degree, and landed a job in Silicon Valley. My career was in high-tech in Silicon Valley, and I used to travel a lot. Any time I would travel, it was always about food for me.

 

My husband gave me Julia Child's set of French cookbooks. Again, that was foreign to me. I only knew about Italian food. I cooked through all those recipes and just kept learning on my own. 

I had two kids, traveled a lot, and worked what felt like 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I decided I would quit in 2001, but they didn't let me quit. I ended up working from home, and during that time, I said, "I want people to know about the foods that I grew up with."

 

Even today, in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, there's nothing that I call authentic Italian. It's more what I call California Italian. I really wanted people to know about the foods that I grew up with and about Calabria because I felt no one even knew where Calabria was. I decided to teach two cooking classes just for fun. That was 2004.

 

I never thought it would lead to this. Janet Fletcher, a well-known food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, heard about me and called me.

 

She said, "Would you mind if I interviewed you? I heard that you are from Calabria. I don't know anything about this region and its foods."

 

She came over and spent the day with my mom and me, and we fixed a bunch of recipes. Then she said, "I want to write an article."

I told her I would like to teach two cooking classes because no one knows about the foods I grew up with. And she said, "Oh, you should list them in the article."

 

I said, "I don't know if anybody will even show up because most people don't even know where Calabria is."

 

She said, "Do you know how many people wear Italian hats? They've never even been to Italy. They claim they're Italian chefs who cook Italian food. This is the real stuff. You should do it. This is the Bay Area. There are a lot of foodies here, and people might be really interested in learning something they've never heard of."

 

I said, "OK, I'm only going to do two classes. Go ahead and list them."

 

A day or two before it came out, she called me and said, "We're ready to go to print, but I think you should include your phone number if you want to sell those two classes."

 

I said, "My phone number is not listed. I really don't want to list it in the paper." She said, "Not everybody has access to the internet. " This was 2004, so I said, "OK, fine."

 

I still remember that first morning because I had not seen the article, and the phone rang at 7:00 a.m. I was trying to get the kids ready, and that morning, I was going in to work.

 

I picked up the phone, and an older gentleman was just thanking me. "It's like the first time I've ever seen an article about Calabria and its food." He started telling me about his grandparents and how they used to make this and that, and I said, "Can you call me back?"

The minute I hung up, I remember I went across the hallway to wake up the kids, and the phone was ringing. I said, "Kids don't answer the phone. The article came out, and people are calling about the classes."

 

I was inundated with phone calls and emails, which kept me busy for two weeks, because the article went around the country. We ended up taking in 200 people: 10 classes, 20 per class. The classes sold out right away. I kept adding and adding, then said, "OK, that's it. This is going to take me into November."

 

I really did not expect the response that I got from that article and the number of emails. All these people were writing to ask if I knew their relatives or if they knew what this dish was. That gave me the idea of the cookbook because there was nothing written about Calabria at all.

 

I said, "I need to get all these recipes down, Mom." With everything that my mom made, of course, nothing was written down; everything was just in her head, so you'd cook and taste as you go along.

 

Norton bought the rights in February 2005. I started teaching in September, put the proposal together, and worked on it. When the book came out, it was supposed to come out in 2008. But then, because of the financial crisis, they held it, so it was published in 2010.

I did my first culinary tour that year. Of course, we had planned it in 2009 because my students were hearing about Calabria. I would bring products back from Calabria, and they would get to taste them. And they would go, "Will you take us?" I said, "OK, I'll do one tour."

 

We did one and a second. Then my husband came on the third, and I said, "I'm not doing any more tours by myself."

 

When he came with me, and everyone got to meet him, they found out he was from Palermo, Sicily, and they went, "Oh, why don't you take us there?" So they convinced us to do the Sicily tour. 

During that time, my agent twisted my arm to do book number two, Southern Italian Desserts. In that one, we covered all five southern Italian regions.

 

Then, that was it. I said, "That's it—no more books." And I did quit work, and then I just focused on the culinary tours and the cooking classes.

 

We also ended up doing Puglia, and almost all of my guests have gone on all three tours. 

Guests sit down after a Borgo Saverona, Calabria, cooking class.

What can attendees expect from a tour?

If you were to talk to anybody who has gone with us, they would tell you that they get to see it from someone from the place. So you're not getting a lot of touristy food or following the tourist track. It features a lot of people that we know that you would never meet. So it's authentic, whether in Calabria or Sicily, as far as what people would eat. And that's what I want them to try. So I am not going to serve you a steak because we don't eat steaks. It's not part of our cuisine. They try all the specialties of the areas we visit. 

With the Calabria one, we tend to visit more wineries because I wanted people to get to know the wines, which are not very well known. For seven years, I just did a culinary tour, where we had two cooking classes, and then there were one or two wineries. Then, in 2017, I changed it to a wine tour. So we visited two wineries every day because I wanted people to get to know all the indigenous varietals. We sold out two years in a row.

 

By the third year, a bunch of people started writing to me, saying, "I wish there could be more cooking." So I changed it to a culinary vacation tour, removed two wineries, added cooking classes, and have sold that every year since then. 

We did the same thing in Sicily. We stay at Planeta, so they make wines. We get to taste all their different wines and visit Donnafugata, where they get to taste their high-end wines. We go to Cantina Florio in Marsala and visit Cantine Barbera, a local winery run by Marilena Barbera in Menfi. It's a woman-run winery; she makes great organic natural wine. But the tours are all based around food. 

We go to the salt pans and taste salt in Sicily. In October, we get to watch the whole process of making extra virgin olive oil and taste it. We also visit Maria Grammatico and take a cooking class with her.

 

I tell people it's a culinary tour. It's not just a tour to a museum or going to galleries; we do that, especially with Sicily, because there's so much to see there. Of course, we also incorporate that into it, but a lot of emphasis is on the food.

 

In Sicily, they get to try all the street foods of Palermo and the traditional dishes of the area. Calabria is sort of the same thing. We move throughout Calabria, and the food is very different. We go to the wine region and right to the border with Basilicata and the Pollino National Park area. Then, we go down to Tropea and Spilinga, where they make nduja. They get a feel for the entire region in Calabria, whereas Sicily has just so much to see and do that I would have to do two separate tours: the east and the west. So, we cover the western side of Sicily. 

 

In all my tours, we also visit a local shepherd/cheesemaking place so my guests can taste fresh, warm ricotta as soon as it's made, and of course, the other cheeses they make. This is a unique experience that nobody gets to have in the U.S., as ricotta is not made the same way in Italy.  

 

 

Cleaning anchovies in Calabria

 

What are your favorite dishes to introduce to your tour participants?

A lot of them are in My Calabria. They get to have the traditional Calabria pasta, which is shaped with a knitting needle. In my town, they're called fusilli. But for most people, the Italian name is maccheroni al ferretto. I take them where they make the nduja so they can see how it's made. And then we have dishes with nduja.

 

We eat a lot of seafood because Calabria is surrounded by the sea. Also, I have them clean fresh anchovies because most people think of preserved anchovies. Fresh anchovies and fresh sardines are totally different. So, in one of the cooking classes, they clean anchovies, and we make a dish with anchovies, which is also in my book. They're layered with flavored breadcrumbs and baked.

 

They have baccalà and many vegetables—peppers, eggplants, tomatoes. We do polpette melanzane, which are eggplant meatballs, but there's no meat. Another traditional dish is potatoes and peppers, which you find throughout Calabria. I also try to get them to have baby goat.

 

We do wild greens. We do a salad of purslane. I have octopus on the menu, too.

 

Depending on when we go, usually in the fall, they get to taste porcini, the wild mushroom. I base the menus on whatever is in season.

 

We do the same thing in Sicily. We do one night more Michelin-style just for fun, so they see you can have your traditional and you can have sort of invented dishes. We do two cooking classes with Angelo Pumilia at Planeta's La Foresteria. He is an amazing chef who can do everything from Michelin-style to traditional cooking. But we do very traditional because I want them to learn how to make those dishes. We'll do the caponata; we'll do the arancini; we'll do the cassata; we'll do the busiate pasta by hand. We do all things that are traditional in the area.

 

 

A visit to Capo Market in Palermo for seasonal ingredients

What's been the response?

People are surprised, especially by Calabria and its wineries. They don't like that they can't get a lot of the wines in the States because they would definitely buy them.

 

And most of the people have never been to Sicily. When they see Palermo and what it has, it just blows them away. In terms of Monreale or Palazzo dei Normanni, it's just the beauty of what's there; it's unbelievable. People don't expect that. They think that of Rome and Florence in Italy, and that's where everything is. People are surprised when they see what I say are the jewels we have in Sicily and these amazing temples that are better than those in Greece.

 

People just love the people and the places we visit more than anything else. Everywhere we go, there are people who are dear family friends, so it doesn't feel like you're a tourist. 

 

Guests finish a cooking class in Altomonte, Calabria.

 

 

 

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