Editor-in-Chief

Francesco Di Salvia

I've pinballed across Europe since I was a kid: Rome, Prague, Oslo, Lviv, Riga. I've been making up stories since I could hold a pen. Published novels, worked movie sets, then swapped one chaos for another: five years teaching machines to understand messy data. That's when it clicked: I don't care if I'm organizing plot points, film shoots, or datasets. I just need to make messy things make sense. So I went looking for the biggest mess I could find. Turns out it's every single ingredient on planet Earth.

Backstory

Fiction writer, filmmaker, professional chaos organizer. Spent years structuring chaos in different forms: narrative arcs, production schedules, massive datasets. I once wrote an entire novel about a family of coffee roasters. Turns out I was obsessing over ingredients even when I was supposed to make up stories. Thing is, I grew up watching three generations of Salernitan women run a home kitchen like a French brigade. In Southern Italy, food obsession isn’t optional. It’s a genetic condition.

What's In My Cart

Ceci neri and pelēkie zirņi because I swap them in recipes for fun, Lambrusco because I have beef cheek to drown, deboned chicken thighs because life's too short to play butcher. Mozzarella di bufala, dill (Latvia did this to me), and bread. So. Much. Bread. I yearn for rye bread now, and I can't tell if that's character growth or Stockholm syndrome. And I always have terrible coffee at home. I wrote a novel about it, but I still drink almost-burnt Neapolitan roast like my grandma. Tradition? No, trauma.

What Fires Me Up

Watching someone in Prague realizing why their tiramisù tastes nothing like the one they had in Italy. Ingredients do more heavy-lifting than chefs will ever admit on TV. And helping strangers eat better. I'm a feeder at heart, just like my mother. She feeds people food. I feed them knowledge. Same genes.

What Burns Me Out

Italians who gaslight foreigners about Italian food. You know what? Ziti al ragù will make you break your pasta. Alfredo Di Lelio was a real Roman restaurateur. Deep dish is a hybrid of pizza rustica and pizza tonda. And people commenting "gloves!" on TikTok like germs could survive being baked or deep fried.