Stanley Tucci wants us to cook together again

I remember standing in my kitchen alone, elbows dusted with flour, watching a dozen strangers knead dough on Zoom. We were all there for a pandemic-era sourdough class, gamely folding and shaping in our separate homes. It was oddly intimate, weirdly funny and kind of moving. Still, I kept thinking: I wish we were all in one big kitchen together.

Which is probably why a scene from the new season of “Tucci in Italy” caught in my throat a little. Stanley Tucci travels to Villa San Sebastiano, a small town in Abruzzo that had been rebuilt from the rubble of a landslide in the 1950s. As Tucci explains, after the church, the first thing the villagers rebuilt was their communal bread oven — the place where, for generations, everything had revolved around bread.

“This place helped rebuild the community after the landslide, but gradually convenience culture meant that those traditional methods fell out of favor,” Tucci notes in his voiceover. “Eventually the bread oven closed, taking the social heart of the village with it — until Lucia came along.”

Chef Lucia Tellone, who now tends the oven, told Tucci it had been cold for 35 years. In that time, the village stopped baking bread. But more than that, they stopped gathering.

It didn’t happen all at once. Store-bought loaves were faster, easier. Why fire up the old communal oven when you could grab a ciabatta at the supermarket? Little by little, the ritual frayed. Neighbors stopped overlapping at the oven, stopped swapping stories while they waited for dough to rise. Until eventually, the oven just — wasn’t needed. At least not for bread.

When Tellone asked her neighbors why they didn’t come back to use it, they told her: “We don’t know how.”

“In Italy?” Tucci asked, slightly incredulous.

“Because today, everybody’s comfy,” Tellone said, with a shrug.

But instead of giving up, she started teaching. One by one, she invited people back. Children, she discovered, were the best students — curious, unafraid and (mostly) willing to get their hands messy. And slowly, the heat returned.

Now, once a week, Lucia lights the fire again. The whole village gathers. Everyone brings something: a tray of dough, a jar of olives, a bottle of wine. They cook together. They eat together. There’s flour in the air and drinks in tumblers. Pizza on long wooden paddles, laughter echoing off stone walls. It’s not a performance. It’s not precious. It’s just people — neighbors — spending an afternoon together, rebuilding community one loaf at a time.

Watching from my couch in Chicago, I could almost smell the crust crisping. The language was Italian, the architecture distinctly Abruzzese — but the vibe? The vibe could’ve been a block party on my street. A little rosé, a little music, someone slicing something warm and golden on a cutting board. That everyday magic that makes you want to linger. That makes you feel like you belong.

It also made me think of something Tucci told me during a press interview ahead of the show’s release, when I asked him to reflect on that moment in Villa San Sebastiano. “I think cooking together is a really great thing — as a family, with friends and certainly as a community,” he said. “We don’t really do that very often anymore.”

He continued: "We’re all sort of, you know, hidden away in our own houses. People get together for barbecues and all that stuff, but even that, it’s like, the guy does the barbecue and the lady does the blah blah blah. I’m not such a believer in that. I think it’s good for everybody to pitch in, doing everything.”

There’s a lot wrapped up in that quote — domestic labor and gender roles, of course, but also something deeper: the fact that so many of us crave connection, but often forget that community isn’t something we attend. It’s something we build.

The pandemic reminded us of this in fits and starts. We flocked to Zoom cooking classes. We baked banana bread. We swapped sourdough starters like friendship bracelets. We made elaborate meals with the people in our pods. We were lonely, yes — but we were also remembering something.

That being together isn’t just about proximity. It’s about participation.

Lately, I’ve been trying to hold onto that. Not just the casual kind of community — waving at a neighbor, chatting with the barista (though that matters too). I mean the messy, intentional kind. The show-up-for-each-other kind. The flour-on-your-forearms kind.

And I’ll be honest: it’s hard. We’re all so comfy, as Tellone put it

But now, as we drift into summer cookout season, maybe there’s something to Tucci’s suggestion: Rethink the barbecue. Instead of everyone bringing a dish, what if we brought aprons? Rolled up our sleeves? Cooked something side by side, bread in the oven, the kitchen full of noise again.

Not just a meal — but a little village.