Calabria

And I think you should go to the website because last night when I was going through it again, it is like a virtual travel.

So we're going to dive into things like who is Paolo Librandi, his family story, Calabria as a region to visit.

to go to the winery, to experience it, the cultural offerings, and so much more.

I'm very excited to speak with him.

I was born and raised here in Chiro.

Chiro is a small town on the Ionian coast in the province of Crotone.

So talking about the eastern side of the region of Calabria, you know, Calabria is an Istmo with 500 miles of coast, crystal clear water.

It's a sort of Small Italy inside of Italy.

So it's tenderloin tips, rigatoni.

There's two types of demi-glace in there, glace de poulet, glace de veau, white wine, garlic, exotic mushroom medley, pepperoncinis, Calabrian peppers, and then I finish it with a little ricotta cheese instead of cream.

which is nice.

It's a little tang to it.

out and kind of like...

Brings everything together, you know, kind of just smooths it out for you, which is kind of nice.

The Calabrian peppers, they're a little spicy.

Oh, yeah.

And they still spend a bulk of their monies more on Northern cities.

You'll hear people talk about, you know, Tuscany versus Calabria versus Campania versus Sicily versus, you know, Longoria versus, and it's always the Northern is the more elite snooty people with more

money.

And I've heard this, I'm Italian American, as you can tell by my name.

And when the opportunity came along with my son to open up a food truck, I guess that was nine, almost 10 years ago, really.

We jumped at that opportunity to build something that we had dreamed about and incorporated a lot of the food that I had studied, which was old world Italian from Calabria.

So we were trying to bring not necessarily Italian-American cooking, but old world cooking with proper proportions of food.

uh pasta and and meat and vegetables things like that our way of of trying to educate a little bit but unfortunately about just about two years into that project into that venture we had a propane leak on the truck overnight which we did not know about and we were going out for service the next day and my son lit the stove to get ready and that just ignited all the fumes that were that were laying low that we didn't know about and In essence, there was a flash fire from those fumes.

the most beautiful seasides you may ever see are in Italy.

So I think of Calabria, Puglia, Sardinia.

Sicily you're going to see breathtaking seasides and just coastal it's just stunning beautiful the water and all of it it's just that beautiful turquoise like clear blue

yeah really natural there

I got to

tell you, my parents were born in Calabria.

And as a child, we actually moved back to Calabria.

And then after nine months, my father said we made a huge mistake and we moved back by boat.

So I have this unique, my immigration story is not a one-way, I got a round trip.

But usually if you saw it on paper, you'd say Dargenzio.

Are you like Calabrian or Sicilian? What is your

background? Actually, yeah.

Calabria is where it's from, but it is my ex-husband's name.