After her father’s Michelin-starred restaurant closed, Alexa Bottura turned on her camera — and ‘Kitchen Quarantine’ became a hit.
(From left to right) Charlie Bottura, Alexa Bottura, Massimo Bottura and Laura Gilmore pose for a portrait in their family's kitchen. (Courtesy of Alexa Bottura)
The 23-year-old recent college graduate wanted to help her father take his mind off of COVID-19’s impact on the restaurant industry. She never expected to turn him into an Instagram star.
I don’t need a choose your quarantine house meme to daydream about my ideal social distance living situation. Because every night at 8 p.m. CET, Alexa Bottura lets me visit her family’s home in Modena, Italy where her father, Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura, is whipping up another dinner for their Instagram Live series, “Kitchen Quarantine.”
You may know Massimo from Netflix’s “Chef’s Table” or from being in the Hall of Fame for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. But to Alexa, Massimo is just her father.
The 23-year-old recent college graduate produces, directs and shoots each episode, which features the world-renowned chef making dinner for his family — from Thai curry to chocolate mousse. In special Q&A episodes, Massimo answers cooking questions from fans.
Alexa had the idea to start a cooking show while talking with her friends on video chat shortly after Modena — located not too far from the epicentre of Italy’s outbreak — went into lockdown. “We're just having an upbeat conversation on WhatsApp...and my friends hear my dad in the kitchen, and they ask me what my dad is cooking,” Alexa remembers. “So I take off my headphones and I turn my camera on and I start having them ask me questions and he's answering. And it seems so natural.”
After the impromptu demonstration, a lightbulb went off. With her father’s restaurant, Osteria Francescana, closed and his other projects on hold, he didn’t have anything to do. He was feeling depressed, thinking about the toll of the pandemic on the hospitality industry. So Alexa thought, “Let’s get him busy!”
Over coffee the next morning, she pitched the idea to her parents. “I thought the idea of, maybe tonight, if he wants to make something a little bit nicer, we could just see what happens and go on Instagram Live,” she recalls. To Alexa’s delight, her father agreed — even if he didn’t know what Instagram Live was (never mind that he has a sizeable following on the platform).
That night, “Kitchen Quarantine” — as Alexa later dubbed it — premiered. “There was no plan,” Alexa remembers. “We do our first episode, which is the easiest dish ever: passatelli — it’s bread crumbs, eggs and parmesan, nutmeg. You mix it all together in this big bowl and then you squeeze it in a potato ricer into your broth and that's it.”
“We go live and all of a sudden the numbers hit the roof! It's like 2,000 people watching in the first minute that we’re on. I was just absolutely astounded by the amount of people that were like, ‘Oh my God, Massimo's on! What's happening? What are you cooking?’ And the questions are piling up. Nobody knew that this was going to explode.”
The Botturas went live again the next night, and a third night, and on and on. Soon their family dinner turned into a worldwide dinner party — and “Kitchen Quarantine” became must-see TV. Write-ups in Bon Appetit and The New Yorker followed. (“I can't believe I have a cartoon in The New Yorker!,” Alexa says.)
Now more than 40 episodes of “Kitchen Quarantine” have aired. Older ones are available on a newly launched YouTube channel, primed for binge-watching.
Unlike other chef-driven shows that feature step-by-step instructions and encourage viewers to follow a recipe, “Kitchen Quarantine” is more freeform, embracing the chaos of cooking at home under less-than-normal circumstances.
And that’s precisely by design. Social distancing has done away with frequent trips to the market to get ingredients for dinner — so more people are cooking with what they have on hand.
The Botturas are also strong advocates for eliminating food waste. Their nonprofit organisation, Food for Soul, establishes soup kitchens using unused stock from local restaurants. As food scarcity becomes more widespread, Alexa hopes viewers will become more conscious of their own food waste.
Beyond spreading important messages to their audience, Alexa is happy that her family — particularly her father — has something to work on while stuck at home. Plus, it’s energising to hear messages of support from all over the world, especially on days when the news is hard to take.
When the government announced that restaurants couldn’t reopen until June, Alexa said her father took the news hard. “He’s been in a little bit of a mood this week. You could see that...something was really weighing on him,” she said.
But going live on “Kitchen Quarantine” gave him some much-needed positive reinforcement. People from Italy, the United States, Brazil, even friends waking up at 5 a.m. in Japan joined in to cheer up their favourite chef and tell him things will be OK.
For Alexa, it’s reassuring to hear these messages, too. The food industry is such an important part of her life (“I pretty much grew up under the tables of my dad's restaurant.”) and she’s sad to see the pandemic’s toll on smaller businesses. “It's going to be a really tough time for them,” she says. “I think it's just important that they know that there's hope. And, yes, it's going to be tough and we're going to have to find new ways to figure things out. But we'll make it through.”
Even as she worries about the future of restaurants, Alexa is relishing the time she gets to spend with her family and finally appreciate her father’s talents. Before the lockdown, her father mostly cooked in his restaurants, never much for her family. “We would never really have meals together. If we would have dinner together, it would never be my dad cooking. So this is a rediscovery for himself and for us as a family,” she said. “Our kitchen has never seen this much use in the 15 years that we’ve lived in this house.”
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