A proposal to create a register of regional dishes, with defined ingredients and methods for each entry, has been circulating between producer associations and regional administrations. As described, it is a cultural inventory. Restaurants are reading it as something that could become a labelling rule.
The case for it is real. Producers of protected ingredients have watched dishes carrying a regional name travel abroad in versions that use none of the region's produce, and a documented reference version is a defensible tool for saying what a name means. Tourism bodies like it for obvious reasons.
The unease among cooks is not nostalgia for informality. It is that Italian regional cooking is not stable enough to be pinned down at the level of an ingredient list, and everyone who cooks it knows this. A dish changes across thirty kilometres, sometimes across a family, and the version that gets registered is usually the one whose advocates were best organised, not the one that is most common.
The workable version is a register that documents variation rather than selecting a canonical form, and that stays advisory. The version to watch is the one that starts advisory and gets referenced later in a labelling or subsidy rule, at which point a cultural inventory has quietly become a compliance test for people who were cooking the dish before the register existed.