Holding Up Half The Stove

Never mind Mars or Venus – food comes only from the heart.

- Christopher Tan

Midway through the meal, the chefs enter the Forlino dining room. They neither pose nor glower, nor lap up adulation like F1 champions. Instead, Giovanna Milanese-Randone, Gianna Fossati and Maresa Biovi weave between tables to personally top up our plates with verdantly pestoed pasta.

It’s something of a watershed moment for this 20th edition of the World Gourmet Summit. “People get a little bit bored of these Michelin stars, so we’ve tried something different,” says Paolo Randone, Giovanna’s son and the then-GM of the Singapore-based DHM restaurant group. Hence Le Tre Mamme, the three mothers and guest cooks, presenting Ligurian classics prepared by their own non-restaurant-trained homemaking hands.

Chefs and mothers. The image of a mother planting a culinary seed in her progeny that later blossoms into chefhood is a powerful trope. French chef and TV personality Eric Ripert, of Le Bernardin fame, chronicles a childhood and apprenticeship filled with nurturing mother figures (and abusive masculine mentors) in his autobiography 32 Yolks. Chef-founder of New York City’s Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton writes with vehement eloquence about maternity’s light and dark sides in her memoir Blood, Bones & Butter, even of how the grinding multitasking it requires carries over to sharpen one’s line-cook skills.