Cast your mind back to April 2020. It’s a Friday, deep into the first Covid-19 lockdown. Absent of a commute, you wake up at 8am, have a little poke at your new sourdough starter and set up your dining room table ‘office’. At lunchtime you do a Joe Wicks workout and take your daily government-mandated walk (still no eggs in the Tesco Express) before joining a ‘morale-boosting’ Zoom quiz with your colleagues. Finally, 5.30pm rolls around: time to shake up a Stanley Tucci Quarantini and join Sophie Ellis Bextor’s kitchen disco.

Four years on, Tucci still can’t quite believe the impact that offhand Instagram post (1.3 million views at time of writing) has had. “I shook up that negroni and then after that it took off,” he laughs, pointing out that he has since learned that a negroni should not, in fact, be shaken, but stirred gently like a martini. “Stirring a martini makes me so happy. You could do it forever as you talk to people – and they watch it, they become mesmerised.”

I’m meeting Tucci at the opulent Connaught Bar inside Mayfair’s The Connaught Hotel, where, behind a lavish marble countertop, director of mixology Ago Perrone is making a ‘TENacious’ – the cocktail created by Tucci and Perrone as part of the former’s role as a Tanqueray No. Ten ambassador. Available at the Connaught Bar from 3-30 April 2024, the negroni-martini hybrid is in homage to the pair’s shared Italian heritage and burgeoning friendship.

“We’ve known each other for a few years now,” twinkles Tucci. “Sometimes [when] you start working with someone you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m not so sure I want to work with that person.’ That didn’t happen.”

“We met in a bar,” Perrone chimes in. “When you meet people in a bar you know the spark is genuine.”

The pair make quite the impeccably-suited, incredibly-charming double act. As Perrone primps our drinks with green mandarin essential oil spray and berry leather, they reminisce about their time as judges at the World Class cocktail competition and Tucci updates Perrone on life at home in south-west London with his wife, Felicity Blunt, and five children. “Niccolo is a chef at St John – he’s so talented – and Camilla is in America, but should be coming home soon,” he says, beaming with pride before turning to me and deadpanning, “I’m tired.”

Of course, the fact that we’re here to discuss food and drink, rather than say, camera angles and character inspiration, is the result of a remarkable second act in Tucci’s career. For those of a certain age, he will always primarily be the actor, director and screenwriter best known for his roles in The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games franchise and an Oscar-nominated turn in The Lovely Bones. If your cultural references are largely from the post-Netflix era, you may well know him best as one of the world’s foremost foodie tastemakers.

“People associate me with the food world because of Big Night, the first movie that I co-wrote and co-directed; I got into the food world because of that. Then I did Julie and Julia with Meryl [Streep] and people loved that, so I was always associated with the food world,” he argues when I make a case for the Quarantini being the pivot point.

“A lot of chefs really appreciate [those films]; they appreciate people like me trying to do what I do, which is just cook. I don't pretend I'm a chef. In a way, I’m the conduit for people who love to cook and make drinks.”

Tucci is being humble. To date, he has published two cookbooks (2012’s The Tucci Cookbook and 2014’s The Tucci Table) as well as a memoir entitled Taste: My Life Through Food – which I know from first-hand experience is brimming with recipes as good as any you’ll find from a professional chef. Then, of course, there’s the critically-acclaimed documentary series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which sees its host pitch up in Venice, Tuscany, Rome, and Sicily in search of the country’s finest morsels, be they from Michelin-starred chefs or aging nonnas. It’s hard to think of a more envy-inducing job – which is probably why Tucci has just signed up for another tour of Italy on behalf of National Geographic and Disney+. The currently in-production Tucci: The Heart of Italy is due to hit screens in 2025.

“I still love to act, and I will [continue to] do all that stuff, but I love it,” says Tucci of his ventures into the world of food and drink. “I didn't know it was going to be as intense as it is. I didn't know that it would give me the opportunities that it has. I'm thrilled.”

Born in New York to Italian parents, Tucci says that eating and drinking were taken very seriously during his upbringing. “I grew up in the 1960s when cocktails were still a thing. My father's family in particular loved cocktails,” he says. “When I graduated [from] university, there was a lovely restaurant I used to go to. I'd save up my money; I couldn't afford to eat there but I could afford to have a cocktail. I don’t know if they still do it, but French restaurants used to have hard-boiled eggs in holders on the bar. I would go and have a martini and eat the hard-boiled eggs and that was my dinner.”

Accordingly, the drink remains one of his signatures. Should you ever be lucky enough to find yourself invited to the Tucci household you will, he says, be offered one of three drinks: a negroni, a martini or a Scotch sour. He is as effusive about his mixology skills as he is his kitchen craft, confessing to having cocktail-making disasters “all the time”. Again, he is likely under-selling himself.

“I think people are much more aware of cocktails now. Bartenders have become like chefs,” he explains of his reticence to blow his own trumpet. “When I grew up, being a bartender was a job and now you're an artisan. You're a craftsman. You're an artist.”

A little like being an actor, then? Proving the point, he designs me a new London-inspired cocktail on the spot: a gin-based concoction garnished with a black bowler hat-style umbrella.

“You could call it the Mary Poppins.”

The TENacious cocktail will be available at the Connaught Bar from 3-30 April 2024, visit the-connaught.co.uk and tanqueray.com.

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