It all began with a bowl of pasta
It was 11.30am, 29 years ago, when Giancarlo handed me a bowl of pasta – and changed my life.
Though I had tasted Italian tourist food on my travels as an art student, no one had ever cooked proper Italian food for me. That day the Italian chef patron, who employed me to paint a mural in his London restaurant, made a bowl of pasta for me. This was a meal he normally produced for his waiters before the lunchtime service but this week the restaurant was closed while we painted and we were the lucky recipients.
As much as I was there to paint, a huge fresco of Roman athletes with a bronze and verdigris frieze, I couldn’t help but ask about how he cooked the pasta. It held far more fascination than another piece of faux gold leaf and a brushstroke of paint. The next day more pasta creations arrived and so on. As we painted, my mouth would begin to water at 11.15 each morning as Giancarlo worked in the kitchen and the aromas of frying garlic, broken rosemary and onions wafted in my direction. No after-shave will ever be as enticing as the scent of someone cooking for you.
From paint roller to pasta roller
Over the next few months, Giancarlo, the chef and restaurateur from Tuscany, commissioned more and more murals from the painter from Eastbourne. Each loved the craft of the other. Every day was spent in the kitchen or painting, Giancarlo became a dab hand at gilding and I learnt to cook Italian. I was soon rolling potato gnocchi, learning how to shape tortellini and produce Giancarlo’s father’s ragu. The chef and the painter became inseparable and moved into a tiny apartment above the restaurant in Marylebone.
One Sunday, just before the millennium, a family asked if we could teach them to make fresh pasta. After lunch service, we took them down into the restaurant kitchen, flour flew, eggs cracked—and something clicked. It was fun, creative, chaotic, and deeply satisfying. The idea to teach others our skills was born.
Blaspheming chefs
We started hosting small, slightly chaotic cooking classes in our restaurant kitchen. But space was tight—and tempers tighter. The chefs needed the kitchen, and so did we. In the pressured heat of service, swear words echoed off the tiles. We needed a solution – a dedicated home for our new baby business and in a rather biblical way, we found an old stable in Marylebone in a tiny mews street. We loved the light, airy room and in 2005 it became La Cucina Caldesi Cookery School.
Classes were informal, joyful and relaxed and we employed Head Chef Stefano Borella to run the day-to-day classes. We were one of the first restaurants in London that taught our customers how to cook our dishes. In contrast to the formal cookery schools of the time, nothing was measured or pre-prepared; our pasta-loving guests poured an approximated amount of flour onto the table in true nonna-style and mixed eggs into it with a knife. Egg on the floor, flour on shoes, pasta on the plate. Over time we introduced measured flour in bowls and pasta machines – less mess and happier guests but to this day, nothing is pre-prepared. We have always felt our students should take whole ingredients right the way through to the plate.
Writing recipes
Giancarlo was asked to write a book of his mother’s recipes but struggled to put pen to paper due to dyslexia. The artist, now his wife and mother of his two children, stepped in to help. Not having written an essay since O-Level English, I too found it a challenge and the first manuscript was returned with “grammar awful” written on the front in red pen. Giancarlo made me promise not to put English twists on his recipes; they had to be exactly as he remembered them from his childhood – authentic, sacred, almost, to his family. With edits, amends and practice, the recipes worked and our first book, Italian Mamma’s Kitchen, was published. We still faithfully follow the recipes in our school.
Preserve and share
More books followed; 19 in total. We travelled the length and breadth of Italy and spent time in Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Amalfi and Sicily to write about their regional culinary differences. I learnt to speak Italian. We worked in both restaurant and home kitchens, guided by generous chefs, mammas, and nonnas—all of whom also made me promise not to change their recipes. Maybe as I am not Italian, and we are not based in Italy, I felt I wanted to guard the precious histories we had been given. It was important to us to share “Italian cookery” as we found it. Isn’t that what writing recipes is about? Preserving a moment in time that might otherwise be lost by deciding and committing measurements and instructions to paper.
Then and now
Still the most popular class is pasta-making but we wanted to show that Italian cooking can be so much more and now we have at least 20 types of classes including “A day in Amalfi”, “Fish and Shellfish” and “La Dolce Vita”. By complete contrast, recently we have included courses on low-carb and healthy eating, inspired Giancarlo’s recovery from type-2 diabetes. And now we teach from our home kitchen in Gerrard’s Cross, and our restaurant in Bray, Berkshire.
When we opened the school all those years ago, we had no idea that groups would want to come from offices, schools, banks – a way of connecting staff over an activity followed by food and wine. Corporate cooking classes just weren’t a thing back then. Now half of our classes are tailormade for groups. And continuing the family spirit, our boys run wine-tastings and cocktail making classes.
Celebrating 20 years and a star
In 2025 we celebrated 20 years at La Cucina Caldesi. In the same year Giancarlo was awarded the Order of the Star of Italy by the Italian Government recognising his lifelong dedication to promoting Italian food and wine abroad. We are deeply honoured – and very proud.