You can be surrounded by the best restaurants in the world and still miss your mum’s cooking. Case in point, Peppe Corsaro, who moved from Sicily to London at 17 and, within days, began to crave his mamma’s potato gateau and slow-cooked ragu. “London was full of Italian restaurants but mainly you could find carbonara,” he says. “Mainstream dishes. I was out for dinner and my friend said ‘Peppe, why don’t you bring your mamma to cook? You’re always complaining.’ I thought, ‘one day I will’. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. She should have her own restaurant. So, I rang and asked, ‘Would you consider moving to London?’ She said, ‘Peppe, I’ll come tomorrow. Even today.’ She was googling flights while we were still on the phone.”
Peppe quickly realised that perhaps he shouldn’t let his 60-year-old mother work in a new restaurant seven days a week. So, in 2018, he put out a Facebook call for additional mammas [mothers], nonnas [grandmothers], and zias [aunts] who’d like to come to London to cook. He was inundated with applications. What began as a crumb of an over-dinner idea rapidly grew into La Mia Mamma: three London restaurants, with a fourth opening this month, where all the food – pappa al pomodoro from Tuscany, cacio e pepe from Lazio, pacchero al cinque pomodori from Puglia – is made by Italian mothers from each region. “We flew them over, we found them a house,” Peppe says. “It’s amazing.”
