Stanley Tucci on new book What I Ate in One Year and how he’s built his culinary identity

Stanley Tucci has released his new book What I Ate in One Year [and Related Thoughts]. Photo / Leon Bennett/Getty Images/AFP

Actor Stanley Tucci has built a culinary identity one project at a time, from Big Night to Searching for Italy, social media virality and a cookware line.

Stanley Tucci was trying to do too much.

He was cooking dinner for a friend, and he should have just made a cod with rice or potatoes. Instead, Tucci had to add pasta. How could he not? It was fresh pasta he had bought at the farmers market, so how could he not cook it with some onions, leeks, asparagus, green beans, butter and cheese to make something delicious? This should work.

It didn’t work. The pasta didn’t come together for reasons he can’t explain, which resulted in overcooked fish. His mistakes upended the meal so much that he’s still thinking the next day about what might have been, if he had only edited himself.

“It was … ehhh … It wasn’t good,” Tucci says in a Zoom interview.

He prides himself on simplicity – cooking a few beautiful ingredients into a craveable dish to be enjoyed by good company – and he got away from the core tenet of his culinary aesthetic, which, as it turns out, a lot of people enjoy.

In the past four years, the decorated character actor – a steady presence in films, TV and theatre for more than 40 years – has turned into one of the world’s most likable brands in all things food and drink.

He’s got the Emmy-winning travel and food show; the best-selling memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food; and the cookware line sold by Williams Sonoma that’s a love letter to the pots and pans his mother used in the 1960s and ‘70s.

And that’s not mentioning how a viral video of him mixing a Negroni during the pandemic morphed him into a sex symbol and accidental thirst trap.

So when he and his wife, Felicity Blunt, have people over for dinner at their home in London, Tucci, an enthusiastic home cook with no formal training, says his food-world fame doesn’t make him nervous to cook for their friends. Instead, anything that resembles nerves stems from the need to please.

“I want them to be satisfied,” says Tucci, 63. “But you’re just nervous because you want people to be happy, you want them to have a good time, and you want to live up to your reputation.

“A lot of times, I don’t.”

Tucci expands on his love of food and life in his new book, What I Ate in One Year [and related thoughts], published last month by Fig Tree and already a bestseller.

He’s also still doing that acting thing, starring in Conclave, the upcoming psychological thriller directed by Edward Berger about the Vatican politics behind electing a new pope.

Google “Stanley Tucci” these days, and you’re likely to find articles not about his memorable roles in such films as The Devil Wears Prada, Julie & Julia or Spotlight but rather how you can eat like him, how you can clean a cutting board like him, or how his favourite pasta brand should be your favourite pasta brand.

His increased profile in the culinary world in recent years has been anchored by CNN’s Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which won consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding hosted nonfiction series.

The show was cancelled after two seasons because of cost-cutting measures at Warner Bros. Discovery, but Tucci has filmed 10 episodes for Tucci: The Heart of Italy, a new show for National Geographic with the same premise.

When the series will premiere remains unclear.

Stanley Tucci on location for his CNN TV series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. Photo / CNN

Blunt, who has been married to Tucci since 2012, says food and figuring out what to cook together has been “part of the tapestry of how we connect and has always been the bedrock of our lives”.

“He takes such delight in food and drink, and he does have a very specific aesthetic, which really works for people,” says Blunt, a literary agent at Curtis Brown.

“He is really interested and fascinated by people and particularly interested in their connection to food and each other, and it’s a beautiful way to connect.”

The excitement happens among strangers, too.

Actor John Lithgow remembers how he and Conclave co-star Ralph Fiennes were completely ignored one night when they were picking up a bottle or two at a wine shop.

Why? Because Tucci was buying eight bottles, and “everybody was so excited that Stanley was in that wine shop”.

“When we would stop off at literally any grocery store, Stanley would pick up a few vegetables and a couple bottles of wine, and it was like I was working with a Beatle,” Lithgow says.

“Everybody was so crazy to impress Stanley Tucci. You go to a restaurant with him, and all the waiters and hosts are so damn nervous. And he just absorbed all this with the most wonderful humour and grace.”

All of it is still a bit strange for Tucci, who has faced his share of loss and uncertainty in the past 15 years. His first wife, Kate, died of breast cancer in 2009, and in 2018, Tucci was diagnosed with oral cancer that had him struggling to eat or taste.

The events made Tucci, who has gone six years without any sign of the disease, realise that food has played a profound role in everything he’s done in his life – and how he wanted to be around to share it with his loved ones and the world.

Stanley Tucci (right) joined The Devil Wears Prada right at the last minute.

“I couldn’t imagine going through the rest of my life not doing what I wanted to do, which was my work and spending convivial time with the people I love,” Tucci says. “I was going to do everything I absolutely could.”

When Tucci was 13 and growing up in Katonah, New York, he thought his grandmother was “mad” for skinning a squirrel on the back porch.

As he documented in Taste, his grandmother shot him a telling look. He was the mad one, not her. Why wouldn’t she be skinning a squirrel that her neighbour had given her?

Tucci never ate the squirrel, but the exchange changed his outlook on food and life for good.

“With one look, she taught me this is the way life works,” Tucci says.

“That’s an animal I need to eat. Somebody killed the animal for me and now I’m going to cook it. She looked at me as if to say, ‘And the problem would be what?’ And you go, ‘That makes sense.’”

Food and family were always at the centre of his life, and they would seep into his acting career. In the 1996 film Big Night, Tucci, who was making his directorial debut while also co-writing and starring in the comedy, asked to shadow chef Gianni Scappin to prepare for the role as an Italian immigrant trying to save a failing Jersey Shore restaurant.

Tucci, whose character was the maître d’, spent two weeks with Scappin, making pasta, learning how to make a frittata and getting down the mannerisms for how a chef would properly wipe their hands clean.

“Stanley was nobody, I didn’t know who he was,” says Scappin, co-owner of several restaurants in Upstate New York.

“They asked if he could come into the kitchen to spend some time with me. My first question was, ‘Is this for free?’”

As Tucci’s acting career progressed, so did his love of food and drink; he hosted a short-lived wine show on PBS and published cookbooks in 2012 and 2014.

When he was getting treated for cancer, he couldn’t speak or swallow, and he feared that his taste would be gone for good. During this time, he and Blunt, who had just had their second child together, were watching many World War II documentaries and food shows. They had a purpose.

“One was about how life can be terrible, but you can survive. And the other was like, one day, you will eat again, and you will reengage in this,” Blunt says.

“That was a really lonely time, but I think some of the strength you have from family and knowing you have young kids and children who lost a parent to cancer, it was a necessity that you have to be able to get up and carry on, because they all really need you.”

Stanley Tucci's memoir Taste explains how a bout with cancer took his passion for ragù and risotto, but also Cuban-Chinese stews and minke whale, to new heights. Photo / Charlotte Hadden/The New York Times

The CNN show changed the trajectory of his career, especially at a time in early 2021 when the series transported people unable to travel because of the coronavirus to a weekly hangout with Tucci in Italy.

His rise has led to inevitable comparisons to the late Anthony Bourdain, the decorated chef whose CNN series, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, helped the genre of food and travel shows explode by exploring the deeper connection between cultures and cuisine.

In the years since Bourdain’s death by suicide in 2018, some fans have been searching for the person or people to help fill the void. Padma Lakshmi and her Hulu show, Taste the Nation, have helped satiate that appetite, but others have looked to Tucci.

Tucci is asked the Bourdain question often nowadays.

The answer is the same: He does not want that. Not at all.

“I’m not Anthony. He knew more about food of the world than I will ever know,” Tucci says. “He changed the way we see food, which means he changed the way we see the world. And if I can play a small role in that, then that’s great. But I hardly think I’m the next Bourdain.”

While Tucci has largely enjoyed critical success in his second act as a culinary guide on TV – the Guardian once noted that “the actor’s so charming that you risk becoming pregnant through the screen” – others have argued that it “is a good show, but not quite a great one” and that its culinary discoveries are nothing new.

“The whole point of the show, to me, was to tell the history of Italy through its food. And that food is very complicated because Italy is very complicated,” Tucci says.

“How can you not tell that story? You’re telling people’s personal stories as they relate to where they live. I want it to look good, but I never want it to be food porn.”

The mention of “food porn” is a reminder to not ask Tucci whether he’s interested in competing in a cooking competition that has dominated food TV over the years or judging one of them.

“I hate competitions. I hate them,” he says. “I like them if you’re playing a soccer match or if you’re playing tennis. That’s a competition. But I can’t say if that guy’s food is good.

“It is like a painting in that they’re all different. Some of them aren’t good, but some of them are. … I can make a Bolognese in one day and it’s good, and I can make it the next time and it’s f***ing awful, right?”

This happens regularly with Tucci, who remembers the disgusting food he’s had on airplanes, or at press junkets, or the meals he misfires on almost as much as he does the incredible ones.

All his bad meals are documented in his new book, but he never names the restaurants. Blunt says that since “Searching for Italy,” restaurants are keen for Tucci’s feedback, knowing his reputation is now so closely aligned to the culinary world.

“It’s part of life,” he tells me. “Not everything is going to be good.”

Stanley Tucci's new book What I Ate in One Year [and Related Thoughts] is out now.

Actor Sam Rockwell wanted to come early to a dinner party at Tucci’s last October and to bring a mutual friend and his wife, who were not originally invited.

Risotto was on the menu, and the new guests were vegan, meaning the chicken stock Tucci and Blunt made for the dish was not enough. They needed to also make a vegetable stock and cook two pots of risotto simultaneously.

The kitchen was a mess, their two kids hadn’t taken a bath yet, and Tucci suggested with an expletive that Rockwell, his friend of more than 30 years, stay at a bar until it was time for the dinner party.

Tucci likes things to be close to perfect when guests arrive.

“It’s so rude and uncouth to do that to a man like Stanley Tucci, who was making this beautiful dinner,” Rockwell says, laughing.

“He broke my balls for such a long time about it, and I deserved it.

“But they don’t make guys like Stanley anymore.”

Tucci, dressed casually in a black T-shirt, is taking a break from filming the second season of the Prime Video series Citadel to do press for the book and Conclave. He still can’t believe both he and his wife forgot their anniversary, which they ended up celebrating by making soup.

He knows he’s doing a lot in his life right now, but that’s how Tucci wants it to be. He jokes that he’s often torn about what to do at this part of his life, split between just wanting to solve crossword puzzles all day and wanting to create TV, film and food projects, as much as he can before he dies or becomes too old to be able to physically do them.

Tucci also wants to keep it simple. To that end, he thinks about all his stresses and all the complicated ways to cook and present food – and how none of it matters whenever he sees how much joy his daughter Millie gets when he makes her a bowl of pasta with butter and cheese.

“It laughs in the face of life’s complexities,” he says.

What I Ate in One Year [and Related Thoughts] is on sale in NZ now