Of course, as with any other profession, it can be lonely toiling over pots and pans far from the home of pizza and pasta. The information age, however, has not exactly broken down barriers of distance but has at least facilitated contact between peers across the oceans and far away.

A group of tech-savvy culinary maestros have taken this bull by the horns and cooked up a storm over the World Wide Web. The Virtual Group of Italian Chefs (GVCI), a network established in 2001 of 700 Italian food and beverage virtuosos working aboard, gathered in their nation and launched the "Itchefs & Co" project this week at "Tuttofood Milano" food fair in the country's fashion capital.

"We, as a group, have grown up and have the right to go out into the world," said GVCI's president Mario Caramella. "We feel an obligation to disseminate essential, up-to-date and correct information among worldwide consumers of Italian cuisine and to protect their rights to get fair value-for-money products and services."

The project, which resolves around an English-language Website (www.itchefs-gvci.org) and a Webzine of the same name, has four members locally. Among them is Dario Congera, chef at Prego, the Westin Bund Center, Shanghai's flagship Italian restaurant.

The Linguria native has been in Asia since 1997 and in Shanghai since 2005 and was in the economic capital of the country on Monday to present a masterpiece at the GVCI's "The World in a Dish" spectacle at the fair. Italian cuisine is often focused on spaghetti Bolognese, lasagna and tiramisu, but five chefs - two from China, two from Japan and one from the United States - demonstrated that they could apply fusion to what is often a traditional style of cooking.

"It was good fun," said Congera after the event, which was essentially a workshop. "It's been a long time since I got to do a fusion dish, especially in Italy. In Italy we stick to Italian dishes using Italian ingredients."

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