Even after nearly 50 years in South Africa, Ezio De Biaggi, part-owner of Magica Roma in Pinelands, Cape Town, still has the accento Italiano of an actor in a Fellini film if he suddenly switched to English. 

Some things just sound better in an Italian accent – Alcune cose suonano meglio con un accento Italiano – and that includes Ezio sharing his personal recipes on his new YouTube cooking channel as he sees through lockdown by making magic with parmigiano and passione.

So far, we’ve watched how to make vegetable lasagne: “Eggplant, basil, onion, garlic, white sauce, tomato passata and parmigiano. The eggplant is a sponge absorbing the olive oil… Aah, we gotta lovely smell in here…”

Watch Ezio make lasagne with eggplant:

We’ve feasted on Ezio explaining the intricate simplicity of making risotto with mushroom and sage: “A mix of mushrooms, parmesan, white wine, chicken stock and carnaroli rice”. It must, he insists, have “the same consistency as volcanic lava”.

Watch Ezio make Risotto with mushrooms and sage:

“Remember with rice you must have lotsa patience. You start and you finish. You don’t gonna go for a walk or a cigarette or a chat with your friends, because it’s not gonna work. Rice needs attention. You cannot leave the kitchen. The stove you can, but the kitchen you can’t. You don’t wanna over cook it.”

He leans closer to the camera. He’s serious about this: “It must not be like porridge because porridge is not risotto.”

His mama, you see, made risotto every Sunday. As often as possible, the family including his three brothers would drive to their grandparents in Rassa, a village in the Piemonte area, close to Ezio’s home in Borgosesia. There, in the north of Italy, surrounded by the Alps, his grandparents grew their own vegetables – beans, baby marrows and spinach. “We could even grow potatoes close by.”

Ezio De Biaggi’s risotto with mushroom and sage: ‘Risotto needs attention, you can’t walk away.’ (Photo: Justin Munitz)

Under the kitchen, via a trap door leading to a cellar, was a cool slice of heavenly abundance. “It was perfect for maturing Toma cheese which we preserved with salt, and it’s where we kept our wines, salami, potatoes and other vegetables. The floor was soil and in summer or winter, it had the same temperature.”

Ezio still longs for his mother’s bollito misto – boiled meat of chicken and beef, or tongue, with a bay leaf, carrots, celery and herbs. “The secret, my mother said, was to burn the onion first on a wood fire, because that makes all the difference to the flavour, and then throw in a tot of grappa.’” 

These memories came with him to South Africa after hotel school in the early Seventies. He worked at the Foreshore’s Heerengracht Hotel, then the President Hotel in Bantry Bay before being offered the job of managing La Perla in Sea Point by the owner Emiliano Sandri. By now, Ezio had learnt a smattering of English. “The first English word I learned was ‘thank you’.”

It was a good word to learn. Because La Perla was no ordinary restaurant. It was a place that the nouveau riche of the Atlantic Seaboard had taken to their hearts. The restaurant had moved from town to its place of wonder on Beach Road with white tablecloths, wood-carved chairs heavy as thrones and huge sliding glass panels overlooking the beachfront and The Pavilion swimming pool – “The Pav” as us locals called it.

Here was a see-and-be-seen restaurant that the Gucci crowd clung to as their very own catwalk, a place where the Chablis flowed freely and deals were made over crayfish bisque or Sole Florentina. It was a Seventies architectural beauty that attracted the crème de la crème of the local rag trade then – Roy Curitz, Aaron Searle and Fabiani’s Jeffrey Fabian. On any given night, you might see Christo Wiese in one corner and Barbara and Chris Barnard in the other. It was the sort of place that Gina Lollobrigida chose to visit when she came to South Africa. “People would arrive for lunch and leave at night,” says Ezio.

Models and beauty queens were plentiful. “I think Margaret Gardiner was one,” says Ezio. “Anneline (Kriel/Kerzner), too.”

Did you say “white privilege”? Yes. It was the Seventies. Did we as patrons wonder about the unchanging group of Indian waiters who, though they aged as we did over the years, still remembered our favourite dishes and asked after our families? Well, maybe at times. Certainly many of us girls yearned to be part of this sophisticated Shangri La as we bunked school for an hour to have a smoke on the beach opposite. Until, one day, we were sitting inside ourselves, smoking our Sobranies indoors, wearing strawberry lip gloss and Farrah Fawcett haircuts.

There were always queues. “Emiliano would take bookings but the table was never available when people arrived. Everyone had to wait for a table, including Sol Kerzner who was always there with glamorous women. One night, Sol waited and waited in that queue. He was okay for a while. Then he told me to ‘fuck off’, but still he waited until a table became available.” 

“I learnt to never leave a customer waiting alone,” he says. “I would pour them some good wine and tell a good story to entertain them. I learnt everything there.

“The seafood platter was everyone’s favourite,” he says. “We also had a late service after the cinema. Almost everyone ordered the steamed crayfish with pink sauce between toasted home-made bread.”

Us Sea Point girls all noticed him when he arrived, of course, but – sorpresa – he married fellow schoolmate, Robyn Mauerberger, who first rejected his advances. “I don’t go out with men like you,” she told him. (“I mean he was too suave, too Italian,” she says.) (“I liked her on sight, a good looking woman full of nonsense,” he says.)

Ezio’s Pasta Primavera:

After 17 years at La Perla, Ezio joined long standing friend Franco Zezia at Magica Roma in Pinelands as a partner.

But there was a niggle. Would the Atlantic Seaboard locals, notoriously resistant to leaving that pretty seaweed strip, make the schlep to Pinelands? Certamente. “They followed me across the mountain.”

Ezio De Biaggi and Franco Zezia at Magica Roma. (Photo: Justin Munitz)

One regular says: “Listen, the décor at Magica Roma is not Zhoozsh Esmeralda (translation: fancy) like La Perla, but it’s homely and the food is delicious.”

Local and international business people made Magica Roma their home from home. “I remember a bunch of Italian businessmen on a contract came every night for three months.”

Celebrities arrived too. “It was word of mouth”. Prince Harry and Glenn Close were, he says, “gracious and warm”.

“Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones arrived one night, and a woman stopped eating to stare as her chocolate ice cream poured down her shirt.”

When Billy Joel was in Cape Town a few years ago, he visited Magica Roma every single night for supper and ordered takeaways for lunch. Robyn says, “One day the phone rang and Ezio was saying: ‘Hello Beellee, what’s goin’ awn?’ I said, ‘Who’s Beellee?’ He said, ‘Beellee Joel’.”

Ezio’s Chicken Limone with mushrooms:

Ezio says the restaurant has become known for “making food with the original recipe. We do it right. Carbonara, with eggs and parmesan must also have pancetta and guanciale – the cheek of a pig. Personally, I love Cotoletta – fried veal schnitzel with chopped tomato and basil.”

“Parsley, sage, basil, rosemary and tomatoes – they’re all in my blood.”

Final tip for the risotto: “Don’t be shy with the Parmesan.” Non essere timido con il parmigiano.

There’s an Italian proverb in there somewhere. DM/TGIFood

Magica Roma is at Central Square Shopping Centre, 8 Central Square, Pinelands 021 531 1489