This year, we’re celebrating 15 years of Podere Pendolino; we mentioned it in our interview with one of our longtime chefs, Maurizio Fedeli. Today, let one of the owners, Claudio Bracciali, tell us about the beginnings. To be precise, the collaboration with Patrizio began many years earlier, around 1987, with the opening of La Bottega di Gragnone on the outskirts of Arezzo. We were four partners: me, Patrizio, Giovanni, Vinicio, and Massimo. It was an adventure as a general food shop and traditional food and wine shop with gourmet sandwiches. We loved our work; we selected great Tuscan hams and the best pecorino cheeses, and we’d travel to Montalcino to buy a great wine to pair with them. Then we had the mothers of the family, Bruna and Palmira, who made excellent artisanal cakes.
Traditional products were barely mentioned; those were the beginnings; there, for two incredible years, we experienced the beauty of working according to a local philosophy, which has never left us. After that, there was the experience of the Poggetto restaurant in Badicorte: we moved further towards the Valdichiana, also because the center of Arezzo never attracted us on a business level: we liked nature more. The encounter with Cris, the chef at Mirage, taught us the art of catering. We went from a simple restaurant serving typical dishes to offering external service: a boom in business that lasted three years. The intense workload and reputation required an even larger space, and so came Crocodile: in addition to catering, I, along with Patrizio, took care of the pizzeria. It was the time of lavish menus, numerous courses, and endless multi-tiered cakes: conviviality was paramount, but people wanted to eat well and in abundance! I had an open kitchen, and my work immediately inspired transparency and trust from the customers; there was great engagement and a kind of entertainment. This certainly allowed for a direct relationship between the owners and the customers, building trust and loyalty from the 1990s to 2016, which continued to be reflected in the external catering service.
The relationship between the partners was reduced to Patrizio and I, in a complicity that happily endures today, with a clear division of duties. But there was one snag, always the same: expensive rent. It was time to take the big step: buying our own premises. It was 2006, and the dream was starting to become a reality.
The story continues …