Roberto Carcangiu

Food design, scientific disciplines, the food industry: Roberto Carcangiu’s CV and activities feature more or less all the contaminations with which professional cooking has had fun flirting in recent decades, achieving excellent results that we are all familiar with. He underwent the standard chef’s training, with no lack of satisfaction, moving from one Michelin star to another. At the age of 35 however, with an extensive amount of international experience under his belt, the contacts matured and furthered in the threshold areas of the profession led Carcangiu to rethink his professional identity. This led to the birth of the figure of the R&D cooking director, as he likes to define his work: an absolute innovation in the international panorama.

These challenges have always been won, the first being his elevation to the role of teacher, which he exercises in the most qualified professional structures: Étoile, Castalimenti, Academia Barilla. His technological intuitions become reality thanks to the collaboration with important companies for which Carcangiu works as research and development consultant, alongside physicists, chemists and designers. And it is in this way that, together with Angelo Po, Grandi Cucine studies and designs hobs. With the famous nutritionist Professor Carlo Cannella he wrote one of his four books, Nutrire la mente in cucina (Nourishing the mind in the kitchen).

Last but not least, Carcangiu is partner and founder of FoodDesign Studio, an enterprise developed with designer Paolo Barichella to combine experiences and multi-disciplinary knowledge, exploring food in all its aspects, in order to make the most of the dissemination of design culture. In particular, the spotlight is focused on the new discipline of food design, aimed at the creation of food architectures placed into context. Researches that lead to the programming of politically correct gastronomy: this is the concept of Alta Cucina Democratica (or common sense cooking), a mix of nutritional optimisation and popular dissemination which can be grasped thanks to the knowledge of economies of scale. And which reserve well-deserved feedback in the kitchen, in the intense banqueting and catering activity that Carcangiu continues to perform for high-profile cultural events.