At a recent major wine event in New York City promoting Barolo and Barbaresco wines and general tourism to Piedmont, Italy, I heard a rumor that one of the best and most influential Italian chefs, Davide Scabin, will be opening a new venue. His last renowned restaurant Combal.zero (pronounced Combal Dot Zero) closed in 2020 because of the pandemic, and the culinary world has been much poorer for its absence.
I first met Davide Scabin, owner and top toque of Combal.Zero in 2005, during a press visit to Torino (Turin) prior to the 2006 Olympics. In my mind, he still stands as a gigantic figure in the Italian gastronomic landscape. I consider him to be one of the most innovative Italian chefs and a pioneer who started a new chapter in the modern Italian culinary scene.
We then returned in 2010 and 2016, and his dishes never stopped amazing us.
Chef Scabin’s philosophy has been concept cuisine or the restaurant as theater.
After tasting his food, we thought he was an extremely talented chef, steeped in modern cooking without forgetting his own culinary roots. His kitchen became famous for merging traditional Piemontese flavors with highly eccentric cooking techniques.
He took apart ingredients to reassemble them in unusual ways, e.g. deconstructed pizzas, cybereggs, etc. He found his way into a kitchen in 1994, when he decided to embrace his passion for great food and opened his first trattoria in Almese, Turin. He called it Combal.
He has been focused on traditional trattoria dishes, always favoring regional and seasonal ingredients. His reinterpretation of regional classics started to attract the attention of gastronomes from all over Europe. As his trattoria space started to feel small for his increasing clientele, he opened a restaurant within the Castello di Rivoli in 2000, which he called Combal.Zero.
In this new kitchen, he felt free to experiment with different ingredients, food textures, and methods of cooking with spectacular results.
Over the years, Combal.Zero gained international recognition, countless accolades and awards, and was ranked 18 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Davide was crowned by Time Magazine as “one of the ten chefs around the world that will change your life.”
Combal.Zero has also been awarded Gambero Rosso’s Three Forks, further proof of the passion Scabin exhibited in his cooking. The restaurant was awarded two Michelin stars but lost one in 2015, after which Italian food lovers posted their outrage on social media, considering this an insult to this very creative and popular chef.
Combal.Zero was located in the Piazza Mafalda di Savoia, inside the Rivoli building, which is now a contemporary art museum. You could select from three tasting menus: Creative, Classic, or Territorial, or you could order à la carte elements from each menu, or you could order the micropiatti of the lounge that were highlights of his most successful creations. The wine list was extensive with exceptional vintages from around the world.
There were nine of us at the table. One didn’t eat fish or veal, and another was allergic to garlic (what a tragedy in Italy!) But the efficiently attentive dining room staff took these limitations in stride. After a visit to the museum, we arrived fairly early to an almost empty restaurant. By the time we were halfway through the meal, the 50-table room was full and humming. Altogether, including the course substitutes for those who couldn’t eat fish, veal, or garlic, we saw and tasted 14 courses.
Here are some of the most interesting and/or impressive dishes:
Cybereggs with caviar.
His Deconstructed Spaghetti Margherita (an elegant composition of black and white noodle sheets, tomato sauce, anchovies, basil, fermented black garlic, and chili oil) was a culinary delight!
Foie Gras Ganache with Passionfruit Gelatin.
Fried Quail Egg on Potato Chips with a Light Peanut Sauce.
Tonno di Coniglio con Verdure e Salsa Brusca Astigiana.
The above were the highlights, but everything was exceptional!
The wines were selected to complement each course and were all Italian, except for champagne at the end.
We spent more than five hours at Combal.Zero, three tasting the menu and two talking with Chef Scabin who had an extremely interesting story to tell about his life and philosophy. I hope the rumors are true and that he opens a new restaurant because all that talent should not be allowed to disappear.
Manos Angelakis is one of the founders, the former Managing Editor for 25 years, the current Managing Editor Emeritus, and Senior Food & Wine Writer of LuxuryWeb Magazine. He is an accomplished travel writer, photographer, and food and wine critic based in Hackensack, New Jersey. As a travel writer, he has written extensively about numerous cities and countries. Manos has also been certified as a Tuscan Wine Master and has traveled to wine-producing areas in order to evaluate firsthand the product of top-rated vineyards. In the past year, he has visited and written multiple articles about Morocco, Turkey, Quebec City, Switzerland, Antarctica, and most recently the South of France. Articles in other publications include Vision Times and Epoch Times.
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