Italian cuisine has a good reputation to lose: pizza, pasta
At least that’s how Francesco Lollobrigida, the Italian Minister for Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policy, sees it, and now wants to take countermeasures. At an event hosted by Italian star chef Norbert Niederkofler, he railed against the free-riding restaurant owners: “Enough of restaurants that call themselves Italian and use products that aren’t, enough of chefs who don’t know how to cook Italian and often become the subject of jokes”.
In order to uphold the good reputation of Italian cuisine abroad, the Italian government is now planning a package of measures to protect “real” Italian restaurants abroad. As a result, a kind of identifier or seal should also be developed by which customers can recognize certified Italian restaurants: “We can do this by recognizing, also through a specification, the real Italian restaurants abroad. The government is working on a new project which we will be getting underway shortly”.
Incidentally, this project is not entirely new: as early as 2004, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture carried out a test for a quality seal for “real Italian cuisine”. At that time, five Berlin restaurants received a seal from Ardi, the International Association of Italian Restaurants, in a pilot program.
Sources: “Morgenpost”, “Il Gusto”
