Adriano Rampazzo's Lockdown Life
Our Signature Dishes illustrator has been catching up on Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire box sets, playing his old vinyl and cooking, cooking, cooking!
Like a lot of us in lock down, Adriano Rampazzo has loved food and has worried over politics. The Brazilian-born artist and chef, worked and trained in London, before returning to São Paulo, Brazil to work as an illustrator.
Brazil, along with the USA and UK, is one of the three countries that has suffered the highest death toll from Corona Virus.
In the lead up to its publication last year, Rampazzo had been working hard on the beautiful, detailed pictures in our book Signature Dishes That Matter. This year, work has been somewhat harder to find, though he's been keeping busy recreating the dishes he illustrated for our book.
"Considering what’s going on, I’m doing fine. I’ve got my health, and my family is also healthy," he tells us. "I’ve been cooking loads! Every single day I’m make at least something, and sometimes I’ll spend many many hours in the kitchen making different things simultaneously.
"Pickling radishes and cucumbers, making big batches of sauces; I made some labneh for the first time, a few kinds of sushi, many different pasta dishes, tonkatsu sandwich, fried chicken sandwich and what have you.
"With the leftover buttermilk from the labneh I’ll make some American southern style fried chicken. Let’s see how that goes! So from the cooking point of view, the lockdown has been really productive.
"I have also been drawing, surely, but a lot less than I’d like to. I’ve been busier with other home affairs. Besides cooking, I’ve been taking care of the plants, reading a lot, watching films and series. I watched Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire so far. (Very into the Mafia game at the moment!) and taking care of my vinyl collection. But I must say the productiveness pretty much ends here.
"My daily routine hasn’t changed that much because I already work at home, but I’m really missing my Aikido classes. I was supposed to have my black belt exam last month (May). Hopefully we will be able to get back to training later on this year. "On a broader sense, it is quite hard to be in Brazil at the present time. . . On this side of the coin, it is very difficult to be optimistic. It is really sad to see my country delve so deep..."
To see all of Adriano's pictures get a copy of Signature Dishes That Matter, a global celebration of the iconic restaurant dishes that defined the course of culinary history over the past 300 years. Curated by experts and organized chronologically, it's both a landmark cookbook and a fascinating cultural history of dining out. Buy it here.
