Stanley Tucci gives major shoutout to award-winning Vancouver restaurant
Stanley Tucci may be best known as an award-winning Hollywood actor, but he’s also earned a reputation as a foodie.
Thanks to some personal projects like his documentary series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy and books such as The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, Tucci has emerged as a well-respected culinary personality in his own right.
His newest tasty tome, a memoir called Taste: My Life Through Food, has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks so far, and there’s a Canadian connection within its pages.
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It includes an effusive shoutout to a Vancouver restaurant that is no stranger to the spotlight, Cioppino’s.
“I know that in Vancouver I’ll be able to eat amazing Chinese or Japanese food, explore the great homegrown restaurants that spring up every year, and find great fresh seafood, meat, and produce to cook myself. I know also that my first stop will be my favorite restaurant, Cioppino’s in Yaletown, run by chef Pino Posteraro and his brother Celestino,” Tucci writes in Taste.
“Pino and Celestino, who, like my family, hail from Calabria, treated me like a brother from the moment I entered their restaurant.”
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Tucci notes, in particular, the restaurant’s atmosphere, likening it to “an Italian home on a Sunday afternoon,” and superb dishes, which he says “take Italian cooking to another level.”
And he has high praise for the man he calls “my friend Pino, the generous genius.” Tucci writes, “His expert use of the sous-vide method of cooking alone, especially twenty years ago when he first opened, sets him apart from so many chefs, as does his ability to integrate Asian flavors and techniques into Italian dishes.”
The book even includes the recipe for Pino’s Parmigiano stock.
It should be no surprise that Tucci returns to the Yaletown resto whenever he’s filming in Vancouver, since Cioppino’s regularly wins awards for its Mediterranean cuisine.
It was recently named one of the best Italian restaurants in the world by the 50 Top Italy online guide.
And Cioppino’s isn’t the only local spot that Tucci name-drops in Taste.
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In a section about seafood stew, Tucci mentions going to “a place called Joe Fortes, a sort of old-fashioned seafood and chop house” in 1988 and discovering “a fish stew called cioppino.”
He writes, “I had never heard of it before going to Vancouver but I was very happy to have found it.”
You can read more of Stanley Tucci’s epicurean adventures in Taste: My Life Through Food.