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Giovanni Eusebi’s summer of memory, emotion and regional soul by Cate Devine
- Bite
- 10 minutes ago
- 4 min read
“I want to inspire, not to dictate.” For Giovanna Eusebi, the force behind Glasgow’s most distinctive Scots‑Italian food dynasty, cooking is an act of memory, emotion and regional devotion. As she and her team craft a summer menu shaped by Lazio childhoods, Aeolian caper farms and Glasgow roots, Eusebi Deli reveals how a single founder’s spirit can guide a whole kitchen without ever overshadowing it
“I want to inspire, not to dictate.”
Of all the Scots-Italian food dynasties - think the Cardosis, Continis,Coias, Crollas, Giovanazzis, Sartis, and their various restaurants past and present - that of the Glasgow-based Eusebi family somehow stands apart. Perhaps that’s because it’s associated with just one person - Giovanna Eusebi, the passionate founder of the stand-alone, independent Eusebi Deli, founded in 2016 in Glasgow’s West End. She has spent a lifetime honouring her grandparents, who came to Glasgow during the First World War to open an ice-cream shop in Partick, and her parents, who in the 1970s opened a greengrocers shop in Shettleston in the East End, where she has a large production kitchen and bakery. Such is Giovanna’s hands-on commitment to bringing the authentic flavours and cultures of her homeland’s hyper-regionality, and especially memories of family meals in Lazio, that it’s easy to assume Eusebi Deli is a one-woman show.
We sit down together the morning after I’ve sampled the La Dolce Estate menu (served by the ever-charismatic general manager Michael Prior) which celebrates the long, hot Italian summers remembered by Giovanna in a menu which confounds the clichéd superficial perception that Italian food is heavy and fattening. The summer menu offers a wide range of new, delicious, fresh and exceptionally light dishes - one of the highlights for me being the grilled Mortadella Skewers in lemon and oregano dressing. I put it to her that - Michael aside - Eusebi Deli and Giovanna are one and the same.
“Ah, but I don’t do this all on my own,” she replies. “I’m here 100% but it’s not all Giovanna, Giovanna. Eusebi’s my spirit, my soul, my DNA, but my chefs take my Italian story to their hearts and present it to the table. I want to inspire, not to dictate. Every dish starts somewhere - ingredients, place, season, memory. I hope by sharing that it will inspire an idea for a dish.”
Her new head chef is Kevin McCafferty, who came to Eusebi from some of Glasgow’s top restaurants including the Michelin-star Cail Bruich, plus Ox and Finch and Gamba, to take up his first head chef role here. He is working with development chef Zack Brotherton.
“Kevin cares passionately about authenticity,” continues Giovanna. “He has a keen eye on detail. He has all the tools in the toolbox.” Is he bringing something new to the table? “It’s about learning a different type of cooking to showcase Italian regionality. Kevin’s not textbook, not a robot. His menu is a wee bit Giovanna, a wee bit Kevin, a wee bit Zack."
Giovanna’s latest trip was to Aeolian islands, an archipelago of seven tiny islands north of Sicily. She visited Panarea, Stromboli, Ponza and Sapori, where there is a caper farm growing 100 varieties of caper.
“I was overwhelmed by this farm, and tasted candy caper and ricotta ice-cream, which blew my mind,” she says. This experience inspired a caper-infused savoury cannoli at Eusebi.
The watermelon dish, where the fruit is compressed by sous-vide and sliced with identical sized slivers of fresh, salty pecorino and dressed with green strawberries, mint and pistachio drizzled with sweet-sour agrodolce, is uplifting another example of Giovanna’s influence. It is inspired by childhood seaside holidays in her Italian ancestral home in Lazio:
“It makes me think of the last swim of the long, hot day when we’d break open the watermelon that had been cooling in the seawater for hours,” she recalls. “The fruit was infused with a saltiness from the water, lending a unique flavour of the sea which has stayed with me ever since. “We’re not cooking from books,” she adds. “It all comes from emotion. People should get a sense of place when they eat here.”
I get a surprise when I experience my own Proustian moment with a 500g T-bone Pork Chop from the charcoal grill. Sourced from Stobbs Farm in Hawick, its pure outdoor-reared flavour, with no spices or marinades but with a light caramelly BBQ char, took me back to my own childhood of special once-a-week meals. Served with a late-season stone fruit mostarda, a condiment associated with northern Italy, this was a triumph of deceptively simple Scots-Italian gastronomy.
Naturally the team are already thinking about the autumn menu, and Giovanna is working with her chefs to develop a new ingredient which she calls Glasgow vine salt. This will be made from the red fragola grapes growing in her own garden from a cutting she took from her grandparents’ Lazio garden 25 years ago.
“We’re dehydrating them to make a powder which we’ll infuse into the salt to put over fish,” she smiles with characteristic quiet enthusiasm. “I see my role as watering the plant, to see my team grow and develop in their journeys.”
* Eusebi Deli, 152 Park Road, Glasgow, G4 9HB. 0141-648 9999.
