Thursday, March 21, 7:00 P.M.
Members $95, guests $120

Expecting reminiscences of school antics, young love, and a countryside in bloom, we asked Piedmont native Enzo Fargione to describe a typical springtime in Torino (Turin, in English). His response? "It's still cold." So much for that. But Spring, he quickly added, is exciting precisely because of the cold—the first new crops are coming up alongside winter vegetables. The sheer profusion of produce, "the mix and mania," as he put it, can really get a chef's creative juices flowing. Not that it takes much to get Fargione's fired up, culinarily speaking. At Barolo, his Washington, D.C., restaurant, the menu reflects "a zany and adventurous profusion of flavors and ingredients that stretch one's conception of Italian food," Phyllis Richman wrote in the Washington Post.

Fargione, who learned to cook at his mother's side, was so smitten by the kitchen that at 14, he enrolled in cooking school in Turin. After graduation, he worked at some of Italy's best restaurants, including four-star Turin Palace, Villa Montfort's Ristorante, and four-star L'Antica Zecca.

The story gets interesting when American restaurateurs visiting Turin selected the 17-year-old for the head chef position at Little Italy Gourmet in San Diego. Stateside, Fargione reunited with cooking school crony Roberto Donna, and within a year, he was sous-chef at Galileo, Donna's flagship Washington, D.C., restaurant. Next, Fargione accepted a chef/owner position at Donna Adele, where, after just four months, he garnered a two-star review from Washingtonian.

In 1996, Fargione and Donna resumed their collaboration with Il Radicchio. Then the pair unveiled Barolo. "The food is, in a word, superb," said D.C. food writer Tom Riley.

The illustrious Michele Chiarlo is providing the fine wines for this dinner through his eponymous wine company. As for Fargione, he plans to capture that cusp of winter and spring, traditional and modern, youthful exuberance and mature subtlety, in his Beard House menu. A tall order, but we know he can do it. If that's not reason enough to book, know that he's visiting his hometown before the dinner, and promises to bring back luscious giandiuotti straight from Turin as a "party favor."