He is excited about the precious book launch that he has been simmering for more than five years. The production of photos began in 2019, but he put his hands in the dough much earlier, to go through his teenage recipes and select the best ones. In fact, we have to go back to 2016, when he published his first book, “Al natural”. At that moment, he had to pause the pastry shop and his mouth was already watering at the thought that he would dedicate another entire title to that art. Thus, macerated in desire, he grew “Pastry a la carte” (Planet). It is the door to his passion and his early years. The removal of the cover, for example, shows a montage of lined binder sheets filled with handwritten ingredients and procedures. The kid came home from school and stuck the sign in “Useful”. The obsession was such that, when he had not managed to write down some of the ingredients, he would set the alarm clock to repeat a program.
“It is a vocation that awoke to me early,” he says. In reality it struck him like a bolt of lightning that interrupted his then hobby: before being who he is, Pedro Lambertini He was amazed by becoming a Disney artist and doing a frame-by-frame reversal of “The Lion King.” That’s why, when he traveled with his family to Orlando at 11, he was much more interested in visiting the cartoonists’ institute than in going to the parks.
Why did you fall in love with pastry? Because he had the extreme need to shorten distances: born in Córdoba, also at 11, the Lambertinis moved to Buenos Aires, and his grandmother (along with the cornstarch alfajores she prepared) was more than 700 kilometers away. Learning to cook was an attempt to miss a little less. He first wanted to replicate those alfajorcitos, soon he discovered a world as fascinating as it was inexhaustible. Then he forgot about pencils and watercolors and became obsessed with preparing delicious things.
News: What is cooking for you?
Pedro Lambertini: I believe that cooking is a necessity that should be taught in schools. It is the most basic and most elementary thing that a person has to know to survive. There is a lot to learn. Afterwards, cooking is my vocation. And a vocation is a person’s capital, which he has to defend tooth and nail because he will accompany him throughout his life. And, on the other hand, cooking has the peculiarity that it makes others happy, in addition to oneself. But first it is a selfish act, you cook because it is good for you. Sometimes I would enter restaurants crying because of a problem and, when I left, I would say: “Damn it, I’m a different person, I left the quilombos aside.”
News: What was the pivot from wanting to succeed in the United States as a cartoonist to taking a gamble in the kitchen?
Lambertini: There were a few years in which I spent my time cooking and well, sometimes the continent conditions you. Then prejudices that did not belong to me had already become flesh in me. Mom supported me all my life, but my dad was more of “be careful because you are going to be a steak maker.” That marked me again because the descent was: I am a doctor, your mother is a lawyer, we send you to the best schools, you speak three languages and you are going to be a steak maker. Later the Cooking Institute paid me, but the warning was there and, in retrospect, it was an ineffective way because you transferred your topics: I believe it is not your vocation to be a doctor; I think he would have liked to be an actor or something else. Then you transfer all your prejudices in the name of love and with the risk of ruining my life forever, which fortunately did not happen. I had the spiritual strength to follow another path. I still had my doubts because I did a year at the UBA of Business Administration, but I always had a problem with age, not with the passage of time, but with the goals at that age. So, when I was 14, I said, “At 18, I’m going to tell my mom that I’m gay.” And at 18 I told my mom. Later I said that before I was 30, I wanted to be one of the faces of El Gourmet, and have my restaurant at 25. And I had three restaurants at 25.
News: What happens if you don’t reach one of those goals in those deadlines?
Lambertini: I think nothing happens today. But I was very strict. I always felt like I was wasting my time. I remember telling my sister that I didn’t know whether to start Business Administration because I was ALREADY 19, I swear. And well I did that year until I realized that it seemed like a test to fill an intellectual void, but it was not taking me anywhere, I felt like I was wasting my time and I dedicated myself fully to what was mine. From there, I went to different places, I cooked with different chefs, I had a project to sell cakes, I was a micro-entrepreneur, I rented a kitchen and sold to ice cream parlors that began to have their pastry shops.
News: Did you ever feel like you had to reinvent yourself or do something else?
Lambertini: Yeah, I always knew that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “pastry chef” because I didn’t want to miss out on cooking.; I like to cook, different skills are required. Today there are many pastry chefs who are allergic to onions and many cooks who are allergic to glaze, and I didn’t want to do one or the other.
News: So much so that he later had three restaurants.
Lambertini: And when the possibility of having my first natural and organic cuisine restaurant appeared, it was the trigger for the jump to El Gourmet. When I joined the channel, it was “the healthy chef”, “the green”, which I loved, but it was a phase.
News: It escapes labels, right?
Lambertini: Clear. I believe that you have to choose, it is the key to crystallizing the person you want to be. At one point they told me to do a program called “Veggi” and I said no, so as not to pigeonhole myself. Then the one from Córdoba appeared and I liked exploring the roots, the producers. Then I proposed doing the one in Germany, because there are not many who have lived there like me. You, more or less, without having a plan, see what you feel comfortable with and what you don’t, and which way you want to go and that results in the aesthetics you want to manage and the style you want to have. I don’t think I’ve achieved it yet, but I’m looking for what I do to have a correlation with what I want to convey.
News: Sometimes it’s difficult to maintain consistency without losing revenue and space. Do you still have the strength to say no?
Lambertini: Yes, I brought that with me as a child and it is part of my personality. I believe I am a person who has enough backbone because I believe I have the resources and comparative advantages to be able to take the path I want.
News: At 41 years old, are you in the place you want to be?
Lambertini: I am much better than I thought, I don’t know if I am in the place I would like, but I look back and see that I can have a quality of life, work that I like; I can manage my times; I can choose what things to do and when to do them; I have no financial constraints in terms of what I generated is enough for me. I advance at my own pace, there are even people who tell me that they cannot believe my validity.
News: Are you worried about the economic and political moment?
Lambertini: Yes, I am very attentive and I am very interested in current events. In fact, I have a Twitter in which I allow myself to post some ideas that go beyond cooking, which have also earned me some type of reprimand from my husband. We are both discordant politicians, which already attracts a lot of attention on Twitter. But we chose each other, even though we think differently about a lot of things, love is stronger and we have been together for 18 and a half years.
News: What impacts you most about current events?
Lambertini: I think it is very valuable that in a democracy the right says I am the right because it starts with a certain intellectual honesty. Now, what consequences is that going to have, it scares me a lot.. I go to the supermarket and I can’t help but wonder how a family with two kids does it. That doesn’t mean that I’m not outraged by what’s gone. What is coming makes me afraid, but I can understand the offended, the repentant, the indignant, the urgent, the hunger for change. And that is a word that is always complicated, manipulated, manipulated; Not to mention the word freedom, which is one of the most plastic and abused. I think it is a mistake to believe that it cannot be worse.
News: In this matter of empty words, what do you think about the marketing of healthy eating?
Lambertini: I think we eat better than about 20 years ago, there is more knowledge of food, more interest and more availability of food. Before, people didn’t know what quinoa was. Today, access to information means that we all know more about everything, the tools are there. And I am not an extremist either, I believe that the habit that is incorporated is a habit that is applicable; I don’t believe in diets, in commandments written in stone or these children they raise now who go to a birthday with their noses stuffed, because if there is no quinoa, they start crying. There is an excess, a snobbery.
