Carbonara and tiramisu: Tommaso Melilli’s Italian recipes with a twist

The pasta favourite reinvented as a sauce for green beans, plus a nifty way to turn leftover bread into a rich dessert

Italian cuisine so often references old times; I love simple food and forgotten tales, too, but I also feel the need to escape this tradition. We opened our restaurant, Trattoria della Gloria, in Milan in 2023, and instinctively refused to spend every night selling a remote and often fictional past. Instead, we explore and experiment with ancient gestures, methods and pairings to create “new old things”. That is, dishes that our grannies could have made, but didn’t.