Taste of Tuscany

Italian Chef Fiammette G Swaniston and her team are preparing to entice Bahrain's food-lovers to the Gulf Hotel with a week of the best cuisine from Tuscany.

The 45-year old chef de cuisine at the hotel's La Pergola restaurant is helping to organise the hotel's third Italian festival to be held from March 4-13.

Born to an Italian mother and an English father, she explains that food has always been a family affair in her life.

She said: "One of my earliest memories is sitting at a table in a Chinese restaurant and my father placing a book on my chair so that I could reach my plate. Eating out has always been a family get-together for us."

From the world of fashion and glitz in Milan as a public relations and advertising personnel, she eventually followed her heart and the family's culinary footsteps into the food industry.

After living in Italy for 10 years, she moved to South Africa with her parents in 1995 where her father opened a restaurant in Johannesburg.

Having learned the tricks of the trade in the busy kitchen, she opened her own restaurant in Cape Town where management at the Gulf Hotel discovered her Italian cooking prowess and invited her to assist in last year's successful Italian festival.

"The Gulf Hotel has got great restaurants of a very high standard offering various cuisines. Each one is an excellent representation of the country it's from.

"One of the delights of Bahrain is that it is very cosmopolitan and embraces all sorts of food - it is like a melting pot of cultures.

"For a 'foodie' this place is fantastic. For example, you go into a supermarket and find anything from any part of Asia and I spend at least two hours shopping. I am still experimenting with the different foods in the market and discovering new ones."

But tradition will play a major role in the forthcoming Italian festival that takes place twice a year at the Gulf Hotel.

For this coming event, Chef Fiammette will offer diners a special menu that will include broad beans with Parmesan cheese, baked artichoke omelette, beef stew alongside a range of authentic Tuscan soups.

"We will go back to the roots of Tuscany with a variety of the most traditional Tuscan dishes," she explained.

"Italian food is very simple and Tuscany, particularly, is a province that is less culinary corrupted than anywhere else in Italy ... it has one of the purest traditions.

"They don't like complications in their food and give great care to raw materials. There is no trace of pretence or any kind of sophistication in their food."

After her visit to Bahrain, Chef Fiammette hopes eventually to travel the world and taste food from all over.

"My first destination would be China as I feel they have very interesting ingredients," she said.

"I would also love to travel to India, Japan and Australia.

"I love to try new cuisines and like to eat things that I don't often prepare. One of my favourites is Eastern food - I dream to have enough money to travel and eat!"

Her top tip for the kitchen is to ensure a basil plant is growing close by. "It's always good to sprinkle a few leaves over your dish after it's prepared!"

Here she shares one of her Tuscany traditional dishes with GulfWeekly readers.