Potatoes, the peasant food par excellence, are at the core of a success story featuring three friends from Piedmont, who in 2011 established the Poormanger restaurant.

Marco, Valerio and Daniele were inspired by a small establishment in Edinburgh, discovered by Valerio during a 2010 trip to Scotland, which served jacked potatoes stuffed with poorly-matched ingredients. So they decided to introduce Turin to the jacked potato, reinventing it as a fine dining delicacy stuffed with the best ingredients of Italy’s and Piedmont’s cuisine.
Thus was born the Italian stuffed potato, made with seasonal ingredients paired in such a way as to bring out the best of the local culinary traditions. Asparagus, toma cheese and cooked ham in spring; stracchino, grilled veggies and dried tomato cream in summer; pumpkin, bacon and pecorino, a fall special; gorgonzola, radicchio and sausage, a rich concoction for when it’s cold outside. These are some of the delicacies you’ll find at Poormanger, along with a multitude of ingredients you can combine as you wish. The one common ingredient is, of course, potatoes: fluffy and floury in texture, medium-large in size, the yellow-flesh tubers are cut down the long side when still raw, baked in a special gas oven for two hours, then coated with extra virgin olive oil and finally stuffed.
Poormanger went from a small 60 sq.m take-out joint to a 130 sq.m restaurant with seating for 60, but the key to its success is still the good old potato: tasty, versatile and cheap.