Alberto FACCANI**

Alberto Faccani: pure Italian curiosity and creativity

 

  • Italian 2 Stars chef
  • Terroir cuisine without dogmatic pause to tradition
  • A style made of best products, techniques and research

More 2 stars chefs here.  Other Italian chefs here.

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Alberto Faccani has been passionate about cooking ever since he was a boy, and this passion culminated in his celebration of being awarded a Michelin Star in 2004.

“When I’m older I’ll be a chef”, when Alberto Faccani was a child, these were his immortal words. It is a passion that is fostered by continuous study, a boundless curiosity and a constant desire to experiment and learn that over time has opened him up to discovering the world and to becoming a member of the Jeunes Restaurateurs d’Europe group at a very young age. Alberto Faccani’s cuisine is centred around the product, techniques and research, and is based on the quality and an appreciation of the base materials of the local area, as well as a knowledge of new flavours and textures.

When 5 years old, Alberto Faccani already wanted to be a chef. He had on his compass the guiding star of his grandmother’s imperial soup. But mom and dad, nothing to do with les métiers de bouche, wrinkle their nose, and this is how his call pushed the “pause” button until the accountancy studies were over. The fire continued to smoulder, warming dinners prepared at home and cooking for his friends’ club. Bold experiments sprouted from insatiable readings, incipit of a library of Babel which embraces an international gastronomy knowledge.

A training novel divided in three stages

When 23, he started to cook, with determination and culture. A simple diploma Ial as a cook assistant is an excuse for the entrance into large kitchens: first the Frasca, in the role of an intern, commis and chef-de-partie, then La Pernice e la Gallina with Marco Fadiga, another good boy electrocuted by vocation, and the precious and abundant biennium at Enoteca Pinchiorri with Enrico Monco and Italo Bassi. It’s a training novel divided in three stages: first, the territory, then the exemplum on how to organize and operate a restaurant and, at the end, the master degree in rigor, technique and expertise. But the pantheon hosts towering masters like Gualtiero Marchesi and Ferran Adrià, who opened him the grasslands of imagination.

Each recipe comes from the spark of an idea

Since the opening in 2003 until today, through the Michelin star in 2005, the cuisine style of Magnolia seems out of the cocoon. Relieved of all that is unnecessary, including redundant technicalities. More and more staff, without risking personalisms. Thin, clean, colorful, “medium-creative”, as he defines it, “because I cook for myself, but I am also an entrepreneur”. Each recipe comes from the spark of an idea. Then there comes the work à rebours, in search of details and procedures of case, fishing with fantasy in the mare magnum of experience and readings. In all this territory stops at the shore: lots of ingredients comes without dogmatic pause to tradition.