Contribution short abstract:

This paper aims to provide an insight into the route of food as creative entrepreneurship by a group of refugees in a northeastern Italian town. Focus will be on the attempt to overcome the category of “ethnic” food in a constant interplay between breaking and taming tradition.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper provides an insight into the route of food as creative entrepreneurship interpreted by a group of refugees and asylum seekers in the host country. In particular, we aim to present the culinary experience of Peace & Spice, an “ethnic” restaurant located in the centre of the University historical district in the city of Padua and in the milieu of the Veneto region, known for the fertile texture made of small and medium size family business. We intend to describe the project of a gourmet cuisine, designed as an exploratory taste trip alongside routes travelled by a group refugees who started the business and manage the restaurant while keeping hiring other migrants. The project is intended to overcome the category of “ethnic” food, generally assigned by the larger host society to similar venues by offering to a predominantly Italian customer a large variety of dishes in a constant interplay between breaking the home culinary tradition and taming it to meet the local taste. In addition the innovative feature of the project is its preference for the short chain and local vis-à-vis imported products, thus opening up ways to sustainability (Alkon and Agyeman 2011). The food experience proposed by Peace & Spice could be interpreted as a successful strategy of re-inventing (Grasseni 2005) and playing with food heritage (Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014) at the same time challenging the tendencies of fetishism and regression of taste traditionally ascribed to our contemporary societies (Poulain 2002).