All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Stanley Tucci travels with his own cookware. Who knows if the rental house’s offerings can be trusted to meet his standards? The actor, author, and connoisseur of Italian gastronomy knows good and well that instruments of the kitchen are not one-size-fits-all, and with the culinary knowledge he’s accrued from growing up in an Italian family, penning a few cookbooks, and touring the peninsula while shooting two seasons of the food travel program Searching for Italy, he’s become a bit particular about his tools. So when the five-time Emmy winner was approached by GreenPan about developing his own cookware line with Williams Sonoma—a retailer he considers “the pinnacle of kitchen cookware”—Tucci boarded the project with a strong sense of what exactly he wanted.
Tucci by GreenPan, available now, features everything from preparation boards to a mezzaluna knife set to 8-qt. pasta pots in four different colorways. One particular piece stands out: All of the items are named for their respective sizes, volumes, and functions, but a 13-inch, 6.5-qt. pan is simply called the Stanley pan.
“It’s my favorite because you can put so much shit in there,” Tucci shares via Zoom. “I just took it with me, actually, we rented a house in the Cotswolds. We had a whole bunch of people coming, and I took it and it was just fantastic. I always [travel with my own cookware]. I learned years ago; a lot of times in England, you can rent these fancy, cool old houses and then you go into the kitchen, and you’re like, ‘What is that? Are you supposed to cook with that?’ So I bring a knife, I bring tongs, I’ll bring a colander.” That kind of pickiness is precisely what makes Tucci the right man for the job here: “I’m such a nerd about this stuff, which is part of the reason I wanted to do this,” he says. “Because sometimes when you’re cooking you just think, A guy who never cooked made this.”
Below, the actor and gastronome discusses the importance of producing the line in Italy, what it means to enjoy your life through food, and his content production process as a beloved Instagram food influencer.
AD: The motto splashed throughout your new line is “Enjoy your life through food,” which is a sort of reprisal of the subhead of your 2021 book Taste: My Life Through Food. I’m curious how you landed on that phrasing and what it means to pose food as a lens or a path through which you live and find joy in life.
Stanley Tucci: Growing up in an Italian family, food is sort of everything. Food is such a huge part of Italian culture. And what’s interesting is that the majority of Italian food really came out of necessity as the mother of invention. It was a very poor country, invaded many times over thousands of years, but a very fertile country. They’re able to grow a lot from the south to the north, even though they’re completely different countries practically. And they brought all that food with them when they immigrated to wherever they immigrated. Food was a way for them obviously to sustain themselves, but also a way to communicate with each other, and it became very personal.
What did you feel was missing from the offerings on the market that you wanted to address with this line?
It’s very much my aesthetic; you like to see what you like to look at, and so I want those things around me all the time. A lot of the contemporary stuff would be really beautiful, but not necessarily great when it came to functionality, so I wanted to make that happen. I wanted something that wouldn’t be ridiculously expensive if you were to buy a set of it, or even if you were to buy an individual piece, it’s not crazily expensive like some cookware is. And it’s easy to clean, because I’m obsessed with cleaning.
Why was it crucial to produce the line in Italy?
For me, they needed to be made in Italy, because we make so many things overseas, we [import] so many things from China. Who’s benefiting from that? The manufacturers. Production in Europe and in America is suffering and has been for generations. So how can we make something really beautiful, functional, and that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg? It has a higher price point, but it’s not insane, and it’s made in Europe with union laborers.
There’s this notion regarding celebrity brands, with any big star–big retailer partnership, that you put your name on something and keep going about your day. But you were very hands-on for this project and spent time in Italy at the factory. What was the nature of your involvement over there?
Oh yeah, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted these things to look like. We went to Italy, talked to the guys at the factory. They had sent over some images of what they were working on, and I liked a lot of it. Some of it wasn’t quite what I wanted. We looked at the prototypes and plastic models, and Jan, the designer, was just incredible. When he showed me the stuff he came up with, he said, “I studied you for months.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” He had watched my Instagram, looked at the stuff in my kitchen, what I cook with, the colors of my kitchen, my furniture, the way I dress and created the stuff with that in mind.
From there, I weighed in on specific components, things like: Can we make this more square? Can we make it so that when you are just looking at this pot from the outside, that there’s a flatness to it, and yet when we go into the inside of it, it has this nice, beautiful surface on the bottom—particularly the pans where you can still toss [the contents inside the pan], that it doesn’t have a square edge, because then it’s impossible to toss. I needed them to be really functional.
I noticed you gravitate towards this calm, muted blue. People are obsessed with the Farrow & Ball gray-blue of the kitchen cabinetry as seen in your Instagram cooking posts, and the divergent colorway in your line—you have the stainless, the cream, and the black sets—is this muted blue shade. Is that your favorite color?
It is similar to the one in my kitchen! That one is actually closer to [the color of] another room in our house, a sitting room. The one in my kitchen is actually, if I recall, Down Pipe, which I think is one of my favorite colors in the world. I just love also the name of it, it’s funny. I really like muted colors. But then also I like a splash of [an accent color], like, suddenly you come around a corner and there’s an orange door. I love that.
You have this huge social following that adores the cooking videos you post every so often. Are those off-the-cuff or is there a whole process of planning that goes into them?
Sometimes we’ll plan. But honestly now, because we’ve been doing it a lot, I’ll be already making something and then decide it should be a video. I’m still really bad, I can’t do it by myself, so someone has to do the filming. Sometimes it’s my wife.
You’re very established in the culinary world, and you’ve got your cookware line now. Do you have any culinary pipe dreams?
I would like to study properly. Just a few techniques, simple stuff, to expand my horizons. My son just graduated from culinary school and he’s now working at a very prominent restaurant in London. His skills are extraordinary, and his understanding of food and what to do with it is amazing. So now I learn from him.
