Fashion designer Ben de Lisi cuts out the fuss when he cooks for friends at home. By Shireen Jilla. Photographs by David Loftus.
The fickle fashion press continue to coo over American fashion designer Ben de Lisi, four years after he won the British Fashion Award for Glamour Designer of the Year (he won it again the following year). And his clothes sell by the rackful in Selfridges, Harrods and Liberty. Ben, 43, designs dresses with a wow factor. They're sexy, slimming little and long numbers, cut on the bias, yet they look simple, understated, almost casual - the sort of evening wear you could put on to go to a beach party in Miami or St Tropez.
Ben's sleek style is similarly apparent in his kitchen. "I don't like food that is overworked. My cooking is like my design: pure, discreet and clean," he insists, crouching in his sculpted black Prada trousers to peer into the oven in his fifth-floor Chelsea flat. "When I was growing up in New York, we'd shout: 'What are we having for dinner, Mamma?' And she'd just say: 'Pasta with black olives. Or chickpeas, rice and tomatoes. Or chicken with Marsala.' So I hate fussy restaurant-type food. Home cooking should be robust and colourful."
Ben was brought up by his American-Italian parents on Long Island. "Home was always hectic, volatile and voracious. And there was always lots of food around," he says, in his loud, enthusiastic Noo Yawk accent. His father's family were Sicilian and his mother's parents were from Calabria. "American Italians retain a much stronger sense of their heritage than Italians who live in Europe. And cooking is an important way of keeping their identity." "They cook Italian food in a very traditional way. My mother still makes my grandmother's dishes, and I never deviate from the way my mother cooks."
His Calabrian grandmother regularly cooked the sweet, pepper, and garlic and herb sausages with yellow, red, orange and green peppers that Ben is serving tonight. "It's nothing special, just poor man's food," he insists.
The whole of the de Lisi family, including his two brothers, Steven and Michael, still sit down to eat spaghetti with broccoli, which Ben is now piling into a vast white bowl to serve as an antipasto. He stops for a moment to call his mother in New York to check the proper name of the dish. "I told you so. She'd said it's simply pasta con broccoli. These dishes just don't have fancy names," he says.
Colour is the one aspect of cooking that Ben is fastidious about, and it's everywhere in his dishes. The orange and fennel salad adds even more colour to the sausages and peppers, and the mashed potatoes are topped with deliciously green, deep-fried sage leaves.
Yet Ben readily admits: "I've never done brights in my collections." As a designer, his signature colours have been neutral: black, inky navy, creamy beige and white. Even the tablecloth in his chocolate, cream and beige flat is taupe and white. But this year, his winter collection branches into silver, crimson, purple and teal, before he goes really bright - geranium, sunflower and topaz - in his pre-millennium summer collection next year/p>
Despite his punishing schedule, including the opening of his new shop in Belgravia, planned for September, Ben always cooks for himself three or four times a week - "proper food, not just opening a can" - and for friends once a month. Tonight he has invited eight close friends for dinner, including Rosemary Perkins, whom he met 15 years ago at his ex-business partner Jean-Louis Journade's London restaurant, Ciboure (now Olivo). Rosemary is cooking with him in his small, neat galley kitchen.
Rosemary is a culinary grande dame, who has helped Zafferano develop menus but more often than not just spoils her family with her delicacies. "She is an extraordinary cook," eulogizes Ben. Her cakes look like they've come from a patisserie."
Her repertoire stretches from Thai to New York-Jewish cooking. "Since we were cooking together, Ben and I decided to do a homely Italian meal," Rosemary explains.
She concentrated on the two desserts: a mascarpone torta with a raspberry coulis (torta di mascarpone con lamponi) and apple in puff pastry served with a caramel sauce (sfogliatine alle mele). "But my absolute favourite is Rosemary's apple strudel...aah," Ben sighs appreciatively.
For Ben, fashion, food and friends are all inextricably linked. (He designed his first collection for Spring 1984 while he was helping out Jean-Louis Journade at Ciboure. He cut out his pieces on the restaurant's tables before sewing them together in a storeroom upstairs.) Tonight, the first guest to arrive is his business partner, muse and best friend Debbie Lovejoy, who swings into the kitchen dressed in a black cashmere camisole and white trousers, all designed by Ben. Then Camilla van den Bergh, a locations manager, arrives with her husband Robert. Camilla first met Ben years ago when she was doing work experience in his office. Five minutes later, florist Fiona Barnett, who arranged the pale, creamy yellow roses on Ben's Marcel Breuer dining table, and her boyfriend Roger Egericks.
These friends are all very much part of Ben de Lisi's inner circle. However, most weekends he winds up at Rosemary and Fred Perkins' house for dinner. When Rosemary's daughter got married, she walked down the aisle in a Ben de Lisi dress. He had sewn her into it himself.