At the feet of Erba Brusca there is a small stream. It is a rebellious irrigation channel: it does not flow into the Naviglio Pavese, it runs pure and follows its own path. “Do you see that one?”. Alice Delcourt points with her finger towards a grassy population settled underwater. “It’s a kind of watercress. It only grows where the stream is very pure.” Alice resembles that channel. Together with Danilo Ingannamorte (and Cesare Battisti, who later left the partnership) she opened, in 2011, the restaurant named after a type of sorrel that grows wild in the area around the premises. “We are surrounded by this ‘erba brusca’ – wild herb. It looks like a clover, we use it to create a sort of meadow at the base of some dishes. It seems this is thanks to the marcite, that is, the irrigation system used by the monks who once lived around here.” The reference seems to be to the Cistercians of Chiaravalle Abbey, who are said to have used this technique as early as the late 1200s to keep the fields more humid during the cold season and to ensure a supply of fodder throughout the year, by leaving the final cut of grass to rot on the field. Which then, indeed, becomes brusca as well.

Erba Brusca’s story, on the other hand, always seems to have something to do with waterways. If the saying that all rivers lead to… holds true, the only possible ending, in Alice’s life, could have been Italy, Milan. Fourteen years after its opening, Erba Brusca is now the point where everything converges: ideas, people, family. It has also significantly contributed to the plant-forward cuisine movement in the city (and thus in Italy), at a time when the city was not yet familiar with this definition. And in truth, not even Alice herself would really know how to define it, to place it neatly into a category. To her, it would mean compressing her cuisine and herself; not something that has ever interested her much. Concrete, balanced facts always fare better than words.

It’s a Shakespearean game: “What’s in a name?”. That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, to loosely quote Romeo and Juliet. Our chef seems to have embraced this lesson as a mantra, though not by design. Because the question comes up, lingers, insists on being asked: how do you pronounce her name? In the Italian way, the French way, the Anglo-Saxon way? The beautiful answer is that there is no single version: there is only Alice. A girl born to a French father and English mother, raised in North Carolina (United States), and who eventually made her way to Italy. As if her destiny had always been there, contained in her name from the very beginning.