After starting as a pizzaiolo in the Marche region, he is now an established maître in Bangkok: 'Working in the dining room is great'

"I also worked with Massimo Bottura...". "Hired! You start tomorrow."

There is a before and an after in the life of Sacha Di Silvestre, born in 1988 in Spinetoli in the Marche region, more or less halfway between the sea of San Benedetto del Tronto and the beauty of Ascoli Piceno. The before has a kind, smiling, daring and passionate boy, who at the age of 13 knocked on the door of the pizzeria near his home, Mister Frog, offering himself as a pizzaiolo's helper for the summer ('I wanted to earn some money to buy my moped. They took me on, but I had miscalculated, I couldn't put together the necessary sum. Dad took pity on me and gave it to me'). The after - i.e. today - sees Di Silvestre co-starring as the brilliant maître of one of the world's most interesting restaurants, Bangkok's Potong, ranked number 17 in Asia's 50Best (it was 35th in 2023, and is steadily rising), 57th in the world's (it was 88th in 2023).

In the world of up-and-coming fine dining in Bangkok, the Marche chef is a bit of a celebrity. 'When I landed here two years ago, the word immediately spread among the industry insiders: "An Italian who worked at Bottura's has arrived in town!". So many doors opened for me. I started to visit all the best restaurants as a customer. One evening I decided to dine at Potong's, a rather new address (it had opened in September 2021, ed.) of which I had heard great things from everyone: I went there, I lost myself in a maze of narrow, shabby alleys in the Chinese quarter, and began to think I had the wrong address.’ He was not mistaken: he came across Potong all of a sudden, like a gem dropped among the rocks. It is the result of the marvellous renovation of a five-storey building where for 120 years the family (pharmacists specialised in phytotherapy, in traditional Chinese medicine) of chef-patron Pichaya Soontornyanakij, better known as Chef Pam, standard-bearer of the "Progressive Thai-Chinese" cuisine, all to be discovered, lived and worked. ‘They were not looking for new collaborators, but I told them I had worked in the Francescana Family... “OK, then you start tomorrow, if you can,” they replied.’ "Tomorrow" was the 31^st of December 2022, New Year's Eve. ‘A few months earlier I was reading a book by Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me. For fun, my girlfriend of the time arranged a telephone consultation with a fortune teller, who prophesied: “You will find a good job between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023.” She got it right,’ he laughs.

In Bangkok, Di Silvestre had only arrived a few months earlier, in April 2022, brushing up on his initial training as a pizza maker: 'There was this South African guy with a Thai wife who had opened a pizzeria in town. We had kept in touch, he wanted to open a new place and asked me to be his consultant for a few months. I accepted. I took care of supplies, management, I saved him something like the equivalent of 80,000 euros.’ Di Silvestre's plan, however, was to return to the restaurant business, and the meeting with Potong was a good one.

Before moving to Bangkok, he had worked for almost a year as a sommelier at Casa Maria Luigia, at Bottura's. ‘I only stayed there for a short time, nine months, because I had a Ligurian partner who wanted to move closer to home. So I found a job at Cantine Lunae Bosoni and three days later we broke up.’ The transformation from pizzaiolo to maître-sommelier had taken place years earlier in London: 'After Mister Frog's bakery in Spinetoli, I went to London, still as a pizzaiolo. One day an emergency broke out in the restaurant where I was working, 'give us a hand' they said. It went well. After a few months, I became assistant manager, then in 2014 I became sommelier in a top steakhouse, Gaucho. I was earning a lot of money. With Brexit, however, I started to feel like an unwelcome guest, so I went to work in Zurich, at Globus, a huge Harrods-style shopping mall. I looked after the cellar. We sold bottles of Petrus or Solaia as if they were ordinary wines. I thought I was done with catering. Then a former colleague told me that they were looking for waiting staff at Bottura's. I sent a CV, but my expectations were low. I was sure they would have trashed my application. Instead...

‘When I was still working in the kitchen, I used to see them, the waiting staff, handsome, perfumed, clean, well-dressed, talking to important customers, getting substantial tips... I wanted to change my role so much.’

Di Silvestre has thus recovered what is one of his vocations. ‘The role of maître has always fascinated me, right from the start of my career. In the late Nineties it had a much more central role than nowadays. They were the soul of the restaurant, a very powerful figure, it seemed to me, necessarily intelligent and empathetic because they had to relate to the most varied clientele. When I was still working in the kitchen, I used to see the waiting staff, handsome, perfumed, clean, well dressed, talking to important customers, getting substantial tips... I wanted to change that role.’ Yet there is a lounge emergency, not only in Italy: 'I can't explain it. Or rather this is how I explain it: working in the kitchen is popular even on the small screen, so it attracts talent, while serving the customer is seen as a diminutio. It's a distorted view; working in the dining room is beautiful. Yet it is hard to find staff, in Italy as well as here in Bangkok: Chef Pam is very famous, she has TV programmes on the local television, but out of 160 CVs we get, 150 are for cooking and only 10 for serving.’

Also for this reason: what makes Di Silvestre stay in Bangkok? A figure like his is sought after everywhere... 'If you work well, you can bring new things here. The fine dining sector is relatively new in Thailand, in great development. There’s a lot of money around: the standards of service are not yet well-defined; in Europe I would be one of many, but in Bangkok I can contribute with my ideas in building a new model. For instance: here almost no one used to serve 'mirror' tables (i.e.: the dishes at the same time for the diners, ed). I imposed it at Potong, and now all the top restaurants do it. I'm not saying it's thanks to me, but I certainly know I'm bringing my knowledge to an area that is being shaped little by little. Then, here at the restaurant, we’re more or less the same age, we work well together, I have carte blanche as far as my skills are concerned, I feel involved in the project.’ This is not the only motivation for an Italian maître in Thailand: 'The salaries are high, the cost of living very low, for 10 km by taxi I pay 3 euros, a traditional lunch is 2 euros. My home is on the 12th floor of a luxurious condominium, with a view over the city. There’s a swimming pool, Turkish bath and sauna. When it rains the concierge comes to greet me with an umbrella. It's a standard of living I could never afford in the West.’ But sooner or later he will return: 'Asia is beautiful, but in terms of art, culture and bien vivre Italy has no equal. Bangkok doesn't have a square or a historical centre, you can't walk around because it's always very hot... In short, I like it there, but I don't feel at home.

In this chiaroscuro reality, Potong is an island of beauty, elegance and of course goodness. As Di Silvestre explains, you first falls in love with the place. Chef Pam proposes this 'Progressive Thai-Chinese' cuisine that is the child of a phenomenon that goes back centuries, with families from the Chinese upper middle class emigrating to Thailand, acquiring prestigious positions there and having their children study at the best universities. It’s Pam’s story too.

At his table, you can enjoy dishes inspired by this fusion approach that is now part of history and offer a contemporary, delicious, exceptionally fiery vision of it: their version of duck is now famous (we have already talked about it here), a delicacy, 'an incredible dish, you go out of your mind. It’s a yummy combination. She combines the beautiful crispy skin of the Chinese recipe with the more European juiciness of the meat. The chef joins the two techniques, nobody proposes it like this, even the Chinese who come to taste it are surprised,’ says Di Silvestre. This is the signature dish: there are sumptuous duck breasts with crispy skin (the bird is marinated in five spices and salt, then immersed in boiling water and glazed with soy sauce and liquid glucose; hung in a curing chamber for 14 days until the skin becomes very dry. Upon serving, it is baked in the oven at 200/250°C for about 15 minutes. Finally, the cooks wait another 15 minutes before cutting), adds roasted duck brain mixed with spices and mustard, the trimmings become a kind of delicious parallelepiped sausage topped with the same crispy skin, the thighs are accompanied by a black bean and chili cream, then stewed Chinese cabbage salad with its crispy leaves, pickled cabbage and three sauces (chili oil, ginger sauce and BBQ sauce).

An amazing dish. The initial tasting of Chinese cold cuts, a Xuanwei-style ham, i.e. a typical Yunnan raw ham, and then two sausages with different marinades (Chinese marinades are characterised by the presence of sugar in addition to salt) is also interesting. The same applies to the four takes on bananas (Banana pulp with chicken liver; Banana flower with fish garum and dill; Banana stem with peanuts and lime; Banana peel broth).

Or again, the classic pad thai is transformed into a carabinero prawn with pickled radish and tamarind, surmounted in the centre by a sort of crispy spiced shell that picks up the nuances of pad thai and is covered by a veil of coloured rice noodles in stripes (with beetroot juice and blue tea, the one obtained from the flowers of Clitoria ternatea, the butterfly pea flower) to reproduce the Thai flag. Or the mikan-dai, Chinese red sea bream, with squid ink, crispy leek and kapi, a kind of traditional shrimp and krill paste, thus Thai ingredients marrying Chinese fermentation techniques.

On this subject, Di Silvestre tells us: 'It took us two months to figure out the perfect pairing for this dish'. In the end the choice fell on Chambolle Musigny. But to close with the pairing, the options two are two: the more classic Sommelier Selection where France and Italy dominate; and ‘a more fun version, six glasses from six different countries. Only natural wines from 24 wine-producing nations.’ We had no doubts.

Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso