Alberto Faccani

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 métiers de la 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.

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.

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.