IF you were to fantasise about the happy accident of being born Italian, Antonio Carluccio is the uncle you would wish for a big, happy, cuddly, hedonistic teddy bear. Meeting him in his London stronghold, the Neal Street Restaurant in Covent Garden, is, with a few minor adjustments, like stepping through the glass of the television screen during any of the programmes in his Italian Feast.
Fade out the business suits in the background and the elegant, pale pink linen. Interpose a few hungry, noisy Italians. Let the boss roll up his sleeves and find a saucepan to stir and there you'd have him, exactly as you expected. A magnetic force, a huge presence, dispensing hugs, kisses and a passionate, seamless discourse about food.
There are two main themes. The first is, quite simply, that Italian food is the best in the world. "I really believe it is," Carluccio says, with a degree of conviction that brooks no argument. "I have reached that conclusion only after years of travelling and tasting the food of many other countries. Italian food has been extremely popular for years, and will continue to be extremely popular, because it's simple to prepare, it's easy to find the right ingredients and the flavours are very, very good."
Linked with this love of his native cuisine and oozing joyfully from his books and programmes, is an unshakable belief in food as a source of pleasure, an agent of civilisation, even a kind of family glue. "There has been enormous feedback about the big Italian family meals in the television series," he says. "With the family in a state of disintegration in Britain, I think people have begun to see the value of sitting down meals together instead of letting children grab a Mars bar here and some other snack there. The British are starting to discover an element of pleasure in food, where previously it was just functional. The pleasure is doubled if you share good food with somebody you like."
Like a chef, perfecting favourite dishes, Carluccio has worked at these twin themes over the years, serving them up each time with vigour and pride. Except, of course, that he is not a professional chef. "I'm just a self taught gourmet cook," he says. "Raymond Blanc is, too. I think people like us may have more passion than trained chefs. We're more conscious of pleasure, whereas they may be more inclined to consider the economic aspects." How did a self taught cook build such an impressive empire: revered London restaurant and food shop and own label products exported in all directions; several BBC television series and a pile of bestselling books?
Quickly - that's how. It is a shock to discover that Antonio Carluccio has made his name and fortune in the food world in just 10 years. Before that, he worked in the wine trade in London, selling on a freelance basis to the Italian restaurants which had begun to mushroom in, the 1960s. Long before that again, he worked in Italy as a technician for Olivetti. But the fascination with food he traces back to early childhood. "I was lucky enough to have had double portions from the age of a few months, because I had a wet nurse," he beams. "Maybe it has "something to do with that."
As the son of a stationmaster (and it need hardly be added, a typically food minded mamma), he was "a kind of nomad" as a child, moving from the south, with his father's job, to Piedmont "where my passion for truffles was born". Later, when the boredom of the Olivetti job had driven him to Vienna to complete his studies, he began to cook. "I had no other option but to reproduce my mother's food. That was the only way I could get it." By the wine trade era, he had developed an interest in regional cooking, nurtured by long lunches with fellow Italians. He married Terence Conran's sister, Priscilla, and then came the big career break.
"We went on holiday to Sardinia together, some time around the mid 1980s, and Terence saw that I could cook well. At that time he had the Neal Street Restaurant for 10 years and it wasn't making money, so he asked me if I would be interested in running the food side. It was a wonderful task. I set about gradually transforming a pseudo French restaurant into an Italian one."
Carluccio's first book, An Invitation to Italian Cookery, happened "like a blitz" in 1986 when a publisher, lunching in the restaurant, popped the vital question. Two years later, A Passion for Mushrooms followed, tied in with a television series. Then came Food & Drink and the whirlwind of culinary adventure in a dozen countries that merely reinforced his Italian bias.
Antonio Carluccio's Italian Feast, the celebration of northern Italian food which was a runaway success in both televised and book form last autumn, he describes as "a crowning of all my knowledge about Italian food; 19 regions with so much variety! You have the influence of Germany and Austria in the north, the Arabic element in Sicily, the Moorish in Sardinia... There is so much potential there that I could write 10 books about it. The next, on southern Italian food - with a BBC series to match in 1998 - is already underway.
His mission, he says, is to present the kind of Italian food that is possible in England (or, presumably, Ireland), given the available ingredients. Which brings us neatly to the fact that Antonio Carluccio also sees it as his business to make more and more good quality Italian foodstuffs available in delicatessens everywhere (see panel). His own shop, Carluccio's, opened in 1991 as a natural adjunct to the Neal Street Restaurant next door.
"We needed first class ingredients for the restaurant and as none of the importers had exceptional food at that time, we had to go to Italy to seek it out from small producers. Then we thought: why not give people the opportunity to buy it? But really it isn't viable to import for just one shop, so, the next step was to see whether similar thinking people might be interested in stocking our food. We're building it up, step by step." The packaging, overseen by Priscilla, is masterly. "The other essential is to have somebody who really knows about food behind the counter."
LIKE most serious cooks, including our own Darina Allen, he is adamant that we must champion small producers, learn to recognise and demand high quality and be prepared to pay accordingly. His own foodstuffs are not inexpensive but neither are they quite so scarifyingly priced as the menu in the Neal Street Restaurant, where a bowl of soup, delectable as it is, can cost as much as £10.50 and a grilled Dover sole £21. "I know, I know," he says with a sigh. "It's no he ingredients that make the prices high but high Covent Garden rents - £175,000 a year!" A cornerstone of the Carluccio philosophy is, however, that provided you get the food right, the economics fall into place. It seems to work. Neal Street is usually full.
The restaurant's success no doubt also owes a good deal to Antonio Carluccio's management style. His guests see the genial, convivial side but there is the suggestion that he can be sharp as a Sabatier blade with his staff if there is the merest hint of sloppiness. "I lose my temper, oh yes, when I see people not giving 100 per cent. Either do it a 100 per cent or don't bother - that's the way I feel. I'm a perfectionist. I have to see everything in case somebody else doesn't."
I wonder what the boss of a small, soigne and extremely comfortable restaurant like his, with every detail under an eagle eye, makes of the current London trend towards huge, impersonal cateries. The question is framed carefully, omitting any reference to the Conran connections, Quaglinos and Mezzo, so as not to cause offence. He grins and jumps on in. "Ah, you mean my brother in law! They're questionable, these big places. I took the staff to Mezzo for their Christmas lunch and for me there was too much noise, too much movement - not because I'm old but because I like to have peace to enjoy food. The pleasure in these places has to do not Just with the food but with being part of the action. But I don't know how far they can push it."
He enjoys the occasional Japanese or Chinese meal (especially jot this down in Fung Shing in London's Chinatown) but has no interest in eating out to monitor trends. This, no doubt, is because the one and only trend that concerns him is inescapably obvious. It is Italian. Real Italian, let it be stressed, not Caf Ital, which he describes as a bastardised version, nor even Rose Grey and Ruth Rodgers River Caf Ital, which he faults on grounds of authenticity, if not quality.
"I am defending the purism of Italian food - simple things with fantastic flavours." The smash hit of Antonio Carluccio's Italian Feast wasn't that giant, coiled sausage he cooked up for the fashion students in Milan, as you might think, nor crispy Pizza Fritta, nor easy, peasy Chicken Scaloppine with Herbs. The recipe that drew all the fan mail was real Bolognese sauce.