Some Italians fear outside influences on their food. Nabil Hadj Hassen, chef of the award-winning restaurant Antico Forno Roscioli, is from Tunisia.

By IAN FISHER

ROME - In March, Gambero Rosso, the prestigious reviewer of restaurants and wine, sought out Rome’s best carbonara, a dish of pasta, eggs, pecorino cheese and smoked pig cheek that defines tradition here.
In second place was L’Arcangelo, a restaurant with a head chef from India. The winner: Antico Forno Roscioli, whose chef, Nabil Hadj Hassen, arrived from Tunisia at 17 and washed dishes for a year and a half before he cooked his first pot of pasta.
“To cook is a passion, said Mr. Hassen, now 43, who went on to train with some of Italy’s top chefs. “Food is a beautiful thing.
While much of the rest of the world learned about pasta and pizza from poor Italian immigrants, now it is foreigners, many of them also poor, who make some of the best Italian food in Italy .
With Italians increasingly shunning underpaid kitchen work, it can be hard now to find a restaurant where at least one foreigner does not wash dishes, help in the kitchen or, as is often the case, cook. Egyptians have done well as pizza makers, but restaurant kitchens are now a snapshot of Italy’s relatively recent immigrant experience, with Moroccans, Tunisians, Romanians and Bangladeshis at work.
On one level, restaurants in Italy, a country that even into the 1970s exported more workers than it brought in, now more closely mirror immigrant-staffed kitchens in much of Europe.
But Italians take their food very seriously as the chief component of national and regional identity. Change is not taken lightly here, especially when the questions it raises are uncomfortable: Will Italy’s food change - and if so, for the worse or, even more disconcertingly, for the better- Most Italian food is defined by its good ingredients and simple preparation, but does it become less distinct - or less Italian - if anyone can prepare it to restaurant standards?
“If he is an Egyptian cook, nothing changes - nothing, said Francesco Sabatini, 75, co-owner of Sabatini in Trastevere, one of Rome’s oldest neighborhoods. His restaurant serves classic Roman dishes like oxtail, yet 7 of his 10 cooks are not Italian. For Mr. Sabatini, the issue is not the origin of the cook but the training - his chefs apprentice for five years - and keeping alive Italy’s culinary traditions.
“That’s why I’m here, he said. “If not, I’d just go to the beach.
But in a debate likely to grow in the coming years, others argue that foreign chefs can mimic Italian food but not really understand it.
“Tradition is needed to go forward with Italian youngsters, not foreigners, said Loriana Bianchi, co-owner of La Canonica, also in Trastevere, which hires several Bangladeshis, though she does the cooking. “It’s not racism, but culture.
Qunfeng Zhu, 30, a Chinese immigrant who opened a coffee bar in Rome’s center, makes an authentic espresso in a classic Italian atmosphere. “Some people come in, see we are Chinese and go away, he said. But in the last few years, he said, that happens less frequently, one sign that Italy is opening up to other kinds of food.
Pierluigi Roscioli, a member of the family that runs the restaurant that won the best carbonara award, said there was a risk that tradition would slowly erode if Italian chefs did not oversee those foreign ones who had less training.
“Without supervision, they tend to drift toward what is in their DNA, he said. “When it’s by choice, it’s great, but not when it happens because someone isn’t paying attention.