All aboard La Dolce Vita Orient Express with chef Heinz Beck | FT Globetrotter

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INTERVIEWER: Next year sees a brand new train service launch across Italy, La Dolce Vita Orient Express, a pioneering luxury hospitality project with eight round trip itineraries, transporting travellers from Rome to some of the country's most sought-after destinations. It was recently announced that Michelin Starred Chef Heinz Beck, one of Italy's most renowned culinary figures, will devise the epicurean experience on board. He gave FT Globetrotter an exclusive preview of what is one of his most ambitious culinary propositions to date.

HEINZ BECK: We're going from north to south, eight intineraries. Every itinerary is inspired by the places where they go through. So it will be a very, very interesting and rich way of experiencing Italian food traditions and these traditions done in a modern and healthy way for the best wellness of our guests.

The menus we are creating are inspired by the itinerary. So if you, for example, depart from Rome, going up to Venice, there you will have for sure a cacio e pepe, because cacio e pepe is very Roman. And maybe you have in the autumn a lamb with artichokes because Rome is rich of artichokes and the tradition of the lamb with the artichokes is there.

We do a beautiful dish today, grilled and marinated cuttlefish. It will be grilled on a coal oven. And the coal is a call out of cherry tree, biological cherry tree. We will start with the Mediterranean flavours. We have two jellies. One is ananas, and the other one is affumicated vinegars.

And then we have this beautiful cuttlefish marinated with citrus fruits, olive oil, and a little bit of salt, but not too much because the cuttlefish has a lot, a lot of minerality. The cuttlefish is very rich in micronutrients and especially on omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids. So it's a perfect starter.

Then we will serve it with different flavours, like these semi-dry tomatoes coming from Ischia because the microclimate is perfect in this cap for tomatoes, capers and olives, olives from Liguria, because they are less strong, because when you use the olives, you have always to understand for what you will need them. If you need them for a very delicate plate, then they have to be delicate as well.

And then we have the onions. Onions are marinated with carpioni, and now I have to put only a little bit of herbs on the top to give a different flavour, a flavour a little bit more rich, and for the beauty, a little bit of flowers, and in the end, a little sauce.

So everything is sourced in a certain season, and everything is sourced in the way that we can give the expression of flavour of seasonal products and Italian traditions to our guests. In every new project, you have new experiences, new challenges, new way of doing your work in a different way.

I think the most challenging on a train is space because the kitchens are very tiny, and you don't have space like on the land for this. When you are thinking about what I wanted to give to my customers, you have to think ahead. How can I do in order that what we will serve be served in a perfect way? And for this, you have to be extremely organised because once on the train till it arrives to the next station, you will not be able to buy nothing. You have to be really, really organised.

Everything train has 32 rooms, so it will be 62 guests. If you have to make all the preparations and the cutting on the trim, you would need a large, large, large space. You have to have a ghost kitchen, who is really, really done in a very professional way. But we will have not only one ghost kitchen, we have three ghost kitchen.

If you are doing it in this preparation kitchen, you can work more precisely. And if you are seeing that something is not the perfect, then you can redo it in order that when the staff is on the train, they have a better life and then have a better working conditions and they have more time to make it perfect for my customers.

For us, sustainability is as important than quality of food, so you will have no waste or much less waste. What you are using of energy, how you are sourcing the energy, are you auto producing it, or if you have to buy it, how you have the packaging, which will be the packaging, they are plastic, or they are organic plastic, you see, there are so, so, so many small little details. But for this, we are working since months on the project. We will still working months on the project for the fine tuning in order that everything is not only good, everything is beautiful, good, balanced, and sustainable.

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