Journey with Valter: A Culinary Maestro
Editor-in-Chief Michelle Schingler Interviews Elaine Bapis, Author of Valter of Salt Lake City: The Magic of the Table
A longstanding, legendary restaurant does something incalculable for a city. Of course, any restaurant’s legacy is built on serving delicious food, but the best also teach diners about selflessness and service, food as art, and the soul-enriching friendship and conviviality that is only known to the dinner table.
For more than two decades, Salt Lake City has been blessed with the culinary vision of one Valter Nassi, a Tuscan-born restaurateur with what can only be described as a flamboyant, larger-than-life personality. Since 2003, Valter’s Cucina Toscana and Valter’s Osteria have set the culinary standards in Salt Lake.
The city lost Valter in 2022, but his legacy lives on in Valter’s Osteria and a splendid cookbook we recently discovered, written by Elaine Bapis after years of conversations with Valter. In our minds, Valter of Salt Lake City captures an expression of comfort, hospitality, family, and the pure joy of creating beautiful food experiences that can only be instilled in a book by a restaurant chef—all of which is rare to find in contemporary cookbooks.
Valter said cooking for someone is life’s best gift, and this cookbook will offer inspiration to anyone who wants to take that sense of giving to the highest level. Foreword’s Editor-in-Chief Michelle Schingler recently penned the Clarion review of Valter of Salt Lake City and was thrilled to connect with Elaine for the following conversation.
How did you meet Valter, and what was your time together like?
Our family dined at his first restaurant, Il Sansavino, in SLC. That is where we first met him. We followed him to his signature project, Valter’s Osteria, and became lifelong friends. Valter had talked about writing a cookbook and I encouraged him. Then one Thursday night my family and I walked into his restaurant and he took me aside and said, “Elena [the Italian version of my name], you write the book.” I was stunned. “You mean with scientific measurements and specific how-to instructions?” And he said, “no not the typical cookbook but something different.”
I knew he trusted me with his vision, and producing something as close as possible to his personality was an intriguing challenge. I connected with his attitudes and beliefs in the importance of bringing the family back to the table and I was curious about his mantra, “The story of food is the story of life.” So, the next week I took my computer to his restaurant, sat down, opened it up, and said, “What do you want to say?” We worked like that every week for four years. He spoke and I typed. Finally, I had a stack of pages with lots of words and no paragraphs, so I put an organizational structure together and began creating a lucid narrative. I took the final manuscript to Valter and said, “here you go! It is finished.” And he replied, “now what we do?”
I realized I had to follow this project through to the very final stage of printing and distribution. So I put a wonderful team together to produce his book. We faced two big challenges: staying true to Valter’s vision and creating a book with dimensions showing his larger-than-life personality. We decided it had to be a coffee table book and had to be a large size with a good story. The photography and layout were key. They had to exceed expectations. I knew early on that it would be difficult to work with a publishing company considering our time frame. We decided to publish independently to have control over the final product and get it produced within the year (2018).
The team was everything and honestly I don’t know how we did it, except that everyone was inspired by Valter. When I look at it now, I wonder how Valter produced all of the dishes and designed the presentations, all in a week onsite, only a few hours before the restaurant opened each day. And the creative designer, Christina, and photographers, Sheena and Trent, produced the photos perfectly reflecting Valter’s inspirational food messaging. I feel like it wrote and produced itself.
This is an atypical chef’s book, both in its size and its format. What was Valter’s vision for the book?
He definitely did not want a typical cookbook with measurements and specific directions. Instead, he waved his arms back and forth and said, “the concept, it hast to be about the concept and the philosophy of food.”
The concept he talked about repeatedly was how to start cooking with your soul instead of following a complicated recipe. Food is about the spontaneity in the creative process in the kitchen. Food is always attached to the table and the table is always the place for gathering stories. Food is a gift, has its own nobility, and is full of cultural traditions. Cooking is an instrument to take preparation forward. He asks you to discover how magnificent it is to prepare the evening meal together and celebrate your collaboration with each other.
The book is for people who want to make something creative out of something as simple as minestrone soup—that is where passion lives. Spontaneity, simplicity, flavor, in the moment—all of these describe his approach to food. The book tries to imitate that. Finding balance between ingredients like porcini and nepeta, preparing without electronic distractions, and recording those discoveries in your mind, Valter believed, connects you to life. “That gift in the moment,” he states, “will remain with you for the rest of your life.” His hope was that we would focus again on the family meal, even with the demands of life, even if it is dining out. Take two hours a night together, enjoying the meal, and celebrating the creative taste and color—this is the joy of the home he remembers as a child. He believes that food is the tie to all humanity.
He asks us to start this journey with a simple question. “What do I have in my home to create in the moment?” Checking out your refrigerator, think about “how foods are related,” meaning in “color, texture, smell, and taste.” When you find your combination, “the food is talking,” and you are ready to create a meal. Trusting in your talent and the “traveling recipe book” in your head will make cooking simple. Valter felt it a duty to convert people from thinking dinner preparation was a burden to looking at it as a creative process, making people happy. The result is seeing the beauty of life.
The bulk of the project is dedicated to Valter’s memoir and an exploration of his vision of food and its place in people’s lives. Why did he choose to start here, and what was he most hoping people would take away from his story and food?
He wanted to write a book about the journey of his culinary life, the truth of his concept, and the dream that he had of creating something personal, something that belonged to him. His journey is the expression of what he had seen in fifty years of traveling the world, tasting and thinking about food. His vision finalized in Salt Lake City where he started a culinary transformation in the city’s landscape over the two decades he was there.
During his culinary journey, learning about food and being a restaurantuer was important to share with his readers because it traces the development of his personalized Tuscan cuisine and how he arrived at his concept of preparing simple food with fresh ingredients. He takes readers through specific dishes, their flavors, their stories, and what inspired him to create something new or how the memory of the food, the dish itself, had a context and is attached to the meaning of one’s life. He wants you to learn about the importance of flavor, the concept of simplicity, and the art of buying food. He shares with us his father’s art of negotiation at the market everyday and then walking through the door with the freshest and best quality of food.
Valter’s vision begins with the belief that food has the power to change the night and that food is the center of the family. As he said, the simple smell of food and its presentation has a mesmerizing effect that stops any conversation and begins the night. Finally, he would like you to change your attitude about cooking. Leave the recipe behind and connect with your own creativity and let passion be your guide. Immerse yourselves in the love, laughter, and joy that the moment of being together brings. You forget everything outside. That is the magic of the table.
Valter’s recipes, which come at the end of the book, are also unusual in format—quite free form! Why did he write them this way, and what can home cooks gain from following this loose guidance that they might miss from more prescriptive and rigid recipes?
Yes, the sixty-five loosely described cooking directions he shares with readers are embedded in the chapters, instead of recipes isolated in scientific form, to represent how food is connected to the stories of our lives. Food always carry a memory or context.
The loose format in part II, with photographic food art, shows the spontaneity in his creative process. The key for Valter was to capture the spirit of the moment through images that practically pull you into the page. The moment could be a photo showing the drip of lemon being squeezed over a plate or the sprinkle of herbs or the photos of hands working the food preparation or the slow drip of honey onto gelato. The challenge for us was to create a layout and visuals that portrayed his free form of cooking. We captured that through vertical shots and strong angles or overheads with strong colors. He wanted to take you into food such as a simple, thin slice of tomato to force you to stop and contemplate that dish he just created. As he said, pointing to a photo in the book, “look at this. It jumps out and grabs you.”
The food he talks about in the book is always placed in the context in which the recipe was discovered, whether it was in his mother’s kitchen where he watched as a young boy while his mother prepared daily meals or in Nairobi where new ingredients gave him a chance to experiment with the combination of flavors. Valter saw recipes as ensembles of color, texture, material, and especially simple elegance. Putting together steak and spinach and accessorizing with olive oil, garlic, and wine or mixing and matching lobster with persimmon, which came from his experience in Nairobi, is how he operated but always simple in style. At many of our photo shoots you would see him taking off anything that disrupted this simple elegance.
What he helps cooks gain is confidence in that moment of creativity when one searches in the refrigerator and pulls out seven great ingredients or stops at the grocery store on the way home form work, formulating the recipe based on enticing ingredients available there to create something new on the spot and present to family and friends as a gift of love.
Yes, you have to start with a base. As he describes the minestrone soup, put vegetables in cold water, add oil and salt, and let them go. Then, you envision adding to the soup and begin your personal creation of the color, taste, and smell you choose. As he says, “the result will still look like minestrone soup but the meaning of it is that you will discover your cooking talent.” That is the freeform style of Valter’s repertoire.
Have you yourself cooked using Valter’s recipes, and if so, which are your favorites?
You have brought up a good point that I have never thought about before or even have been asked. To tell you the truth, I love going to his restaurant and enjoying the dishes there, prepared for my family and friends. So the answer is not really. But I do have a favorite dish that I cook at home regularly—the steak and spinach; I pick up ingredients on the way home and prepare for dinner. Among my favorites in the book are the Veal Chop and Truffles, or Sunday Pappardelle with Meat Sauce, or the Cannellini Bean Soup that they still serve at the restaurant. Now, you have inspired me to try preparing more.
This is such a lush project, with its full-page photographs of tasty Tuscan food and of the chef, its chef’s sketches of dishes in progress, and the generous spirit of its prose. If you could pick a page or a story within it that you think perfectly exemplifies Valter himself, which would you pick?
This question has so very many answers, but I will choose the introductory spread to part II on pages 114 and 115. The photography and the title symbolize who he was and what he believed. It presents food as the protagonist in the culinary theater of life and the chef’s work as the artistic director. Food, according to Valter, is definitely the leading character in our lives. It affects how we feel and has the power to move us into another state being. Its sight, smell, and taste are spiritual, having the inspiration to supply the proper effect at the table. Food composition on a plate is magical in its complexity. It is the center of socializing and the synergy to make minds drift off through the smells, flavors, and colors of the meal. Present a good character and see the pleasure of life expressed on people’s faces. Present a good plan and see how the meal draws people to its perfume and color and brings passion into their lives.
That is what the book’s task is. The photograph represents everything about Valter’s method of preparation—the perfect ensemble of color, texture, taste, and smell—the unique mix of fresh ingredients with sauce all prepared spontaneously. Food Is not only love, it is also art. It has the ability to revolutionize the night.
When Valter passed in September 2022, he left an undeniable gap in Salt Lake City and its culinary scene. What was the local reaction to losing him, and how has Valter’s changed since?
Valter definitely changed the culinary culture in Salt Lake City. From his form of hospitality, greeting everyone at the door, to his table side preparation, Salt Lake City had seen nothing like it. He received several awards for his work, including the Governor’s Mansion Artist Award for culinary arts in 2006. With his death, several prominent leaders of Utah called him “a Utah icon,” “a legend,” “most charismatic owner ever,” “a pillar of downtown.” Together, they applauded him for making everyone from the celebrity to the Salt Laker next door feel loved and cared for while one another dined at his signature restaurant. Today, his trusted maître d’, Arturo, not only runs Valter’s Osteria but lives up to his expectations of food, from the art of buying fresh to table-side preparation to re-producing his dishes—truly a challenge since he never wrote anything down. Valter would be happy and proud that his legacy is carried on.
One thing that will never be replaced is Valter himself, entertaining his guests as if they had just come into his home. We keep looking for his big-hearted personality and electric presence, but see his signature everywhere in the guests’ expressions and surprise when the meals are served. The conversation stops and the night begins.
What do you appreciate most about Valter’s visions of food and life?
I love the inspiration he brings to our lives through his concept of food and his belief that everyone has the creativity to produce artful meals. Food is love, as he always said, and cooking for someone is life’s best gift. His request that you tap into your creative cooking talent is for everyone.
I like the spirit in his generosity, his goodness, his inspiration, and the spontaneity where he accomplished his best work. His concept of food was not just about the recipe but about respecting the process in the life of ingredients; paying tribute to the complex nature of each fruit, vegetable, and other table products; and recognizing what role food plays in our lives. My favorite image of him is sketching the plating for the evening. As he said: “First I dream, then I draw the image, then we find the technique, and then we prepare the food and serve it.” That is the magic of Valter.
Valter of Salt Lake City
The Magic of the Table
Valter Nassi
Elaine Bapis (Contributor)
Montesansavino Press
Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5
Valter of Salt Lake City, a chef’s lush memoir, shares a generous philosophy of food.
A decadent chef’s memoir, Valter Nassi’s Valter of Salt Lake City celebrates the culinary and philosophical grounding that led to his lasting success.
About “food’s synergy and its position in human life,” this is a sumptuous project packaged for coffee table perusal. Its photographs are lush, and it features the chef’s handwritten notes and sketches of imagined dishes as an example of all that goes into delivering a transformative dining experience. It deviates from what may be expected of restaurant-based tomes, eschewing the cold mechanics of recipes sans context to set forth the chef’s philosophy of food: It is about nourishment, yes, but also about the compatibility of ingredients, the art of composition, elevating ordinary circumstances, and one’s company around the table. To be a successful chef, the book suggests, one must be attentive not just to the restaurant itself but to life outside the kitchen as well.
To punctuate this holistic approach, Nassi starts his culinary story where he started, discussing his mother’s kitchen and what he learned at his uncle’s seaside restaurant in the late 1950s. He notes how both environments shaped his culinary style:
In my parents’ house … the business of fine food—truffles, porcini mushrooms, cheeses, fresh fish—conditioned my appetite. Eating for us was not a choice. Enjoying the family meal became a duty.
The result is a rounded picture of a chef’s formation and commitment to his craft.
While the prose is sometimes grandiose or obscure, its coverage of food itself is tantalizing, as with descriptions of one of the signature dishes at Valter’s Osteria: “very thin sliced prosciutto with very thin sliced melone and a drop of honey and lemon.” And the tone is vivacious and hospitality-focused throughout: “The job of food is to make people happy … food [is] synonymous with joy.”
There’s undeniable appeal to the book’s spirited approach. Multiple events are referred to as “magical,” and the birth of Nassi’s son (“our love”) is discussed in terms of “beauty” and how it impacted a New Mexico restaurant opening. Such bountiful expressions pair well with the generous helpings of black-and-white photographs throughout—some capturing the chef’s formative memories, others depicting him in his element, raising a glass to his diners with a wide smile or dialing dishes in in the kitchen. They also complement the bright images of ingredients like squash blossoms and dishes both complete and in the making, including tempting crudos, fresh pastas, and shaved peaches. Pages dedicated to pull quotes make the book more sprawling than it needs to be while also reflecting its overarching sense of joie de vivre.
The book also speaks to home cooks in its later portions, directing them through cooking by honoring ingredients—letting the cannellini bean become what it must; following the possibilities represented by a lobster; knowing when a steak is ready to serve. Rigidity is rejected and creativity celebrated. “I want to tell people to respect the culinary magic inside themselves that guides them to put ingredients together in a chronological way. Follow your inner sense,” Nassi encourages. “Let your instincts in the kitchen be your guide.”
Certain to delight regulars of Valter’s Osteria and likely to tempt new diners to its tables, chef Valter Nassi’s enthusiastic memoir is a vicarious expression of the fine dining experiences at his Salt Lake City restaurant, set in the context of all that formed his broad approach to food and fine dining.
Reviewed by Michelle Anne Schingler October 24, 2024
Michelle Anne Schingler
