We’re back at Isabella Potì and Floriano Pellegrino’s to marvel once again at their research into Salento’s gastronomic roots and at the consistency/skill with which they tread a narrow path. With constantly great results

‘We will take you on a journey through the unpleasant flavours of Salento’.
There you have it: we didn’t write a line when, a little less than a year and a half ago, an American blogger discovered that Bros in Lecce is not the typical trattoria with a cooking grandmother that she may have coveted, and so she came down hard, from the height of her unknown expertise. We did not write a line because we had already expressed our opinion on Bros far and wide, over the years, for example here and here and here, so what was there to add? We’re not big fans of clickbait polemics. But when listening to the words we quoted at the beginning, pronounced by maître-sommelier Rubén Pérez Jiménez, what was already evident becomes even more logical and obvious: Bros is not a place for everyone. I’m not saying that it presupposes possessing a trained palate. Because, after all, who decides when a palate is ‘trained’? It certainly requires the diner to be willing to be different, to be surprised, and to overcome gastronomic prejudices, which often have the deepest roots. Isabella Potì and Floriano Pellegrino make food culture by drawing on tradition while giving it a trendy-eccentric-provocative image and thus causing a short-circuit. They appear glossy and globalised though their menu is written in dialect; they’re metropolitan but have a trattoria in Scorrano, they’re contemporary but look to the past, to the recovery of forgotten products and processes. An original glocal approach, a kind of Salento cosmopolitanism that is a gem to be preserved.

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