“Italian food is like Japanese food,” he continued. “You can’t just add ingredients everywhere — you destroy years of history. The rule of two-to-three is good: main product, garnish, seasoning.”
In the Marché d’Aligre food market, Mr. Tondo entered a butcher shop, Boucherie Les Provinces, and asked if they had received any recent visits from the chef Giovanni Passerini, a mentor to Mr. Tondo nearly 10 years back. One fellow nodded and soon the two were guffawing about the Roman chef — “he plays the guitar and likes to drink,” in Mr. Tondo’s affectionate description — who headed Rino, an influential Mediterranean-modern restaurant that closed in 2014. Experimenting with food alongside Mr. Passerini was a rite of Parisian passage for the newly arrived Sardinian, even if it was sometimes a high-wire act.
“We didn’t know anything at all then,” Mr. Tondo said, grinning. “We just did whatever we wanted. We were just having fun.”
Rino’s end scattered its kitchen crew like seeds, but many members sprouted up elsewhere in town as pioneers of Paris’s new Italian scene. Mr. Tondo opened Roseval, another darling of the Paris food-blog cabal, before ceding the space to a fellow Rino alumnus, the chef Michele Farnesi, who has relaunched it as Dilia. As for Mr. Passerini, in 2016 he opened Passerini, an excellent Italian-Continental restaurant with minimalist décor and natural wines. On a given night, the menu might include anything from tripe stew to lobster spaghetti to fresh mozzarella — from Julien Carotenuto’s Nanina outfit, no less.
If you go
Young and design-conscious, the Italian new wave in Paris is fueled by a lightened touch, fresh ingredients, terroir-focused wines and original cocktails.
RESTAURANTS Sicilian flavors fill the colorful farmhouse-chic rooms at Les Amis des Messina (81 rue Reaumur), where Ignazio Messina serves a long menu that might include pumpkin slices in a sweet-sour baste or octopus in spicy tomato broth. Arrive early for an original cocktail in the discreet basement bar. Francesca Feniello, the chef at year-old Tempilenti (13 rue Gerbier) comes from Sardinia and serves pan-Italian comfort food like tagliatelle with hearty lamb ragu and pana cotta with ricotta cheese and cucumber salad. Amid the shelves of natural wines at Au Nouveau Nez (104 rue St. Maur), the Florentine cook Alessandra Olivi might be making runny poached eggs with green beans and Parmesan, or a meatless Mediterranean burger with crispy fried eggplant and molten scamorza cheese.