Flavoursome dishes by three-Michelin star chef Massimo Bottura and roaring Ferrari engines will sit side by side in the luxury carmaker's hometown of Maranello, in Modena, as the group relaunched the restaurant where legendary founder Enzo Ferrari dined with friends, collaborators, and Formula 1 stars.

Ferrari opens Michelin-starred restaurant to offer full luxury experience

Restaurant-goers usually pay hundreds of Euros to eat the creations of Massimo Bottura, but he will be serving poor Brazilians for free at the Olympics. 
 
The 53-year-old Italian modernist chef owns Osteria Francescana in Modena, rated best in the world by Restaurant magazine this year. 
 
He is known for dishes such as &quot;An eel swimming up the Po River&quot;, or eel with polenta, Campanie apple jelly, burnt saba onion and charcoal salt. It will set you back 220 Euros at his restaurant, which has three Michelin stars. 
 
In Rio de Janeiro, Bottura will be serving up scraps, and his customers won&#39;t pay a cent. The idea is to tackle the twin social ills of waste and poverty with one creative, delicious project, set against the backdrop of Rio de Janeiro&#39;s lush landscapes amid the excitement of the Olympics. 
 
Bottura&#39;s ingredients will be garbage-bound surplus food donated by the catering companies at the Olympic park and athletes&#39; village. He and a team of celebrity chefs plan to use that to make some 5,000 meals for some of the most &quot;vulnerable&quot; people in Brazil, a country plagued by poverty and inequality. 
 
Their restaurant, called Refettorio Gastromotiva, will open Monday in the trendy Lapa neighborhood. The 108-seat restaurant is funded by corporate sponsors. Customers will be chosen by charities working in Rio&#39;s poorest neighbourhoods. 
 
Doing mom proud 
 
The restaurant was decorated by renowned Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, with furniture designed by the Campana brothers, icons of Brazilian design. It is the brainchild of Bottura, Brazilian chef and activist David Hertz and journalist Alexandra Forbes. 
 
&quot;I promised my mother I would use my fame to make invisible people visible. The time has come to give back to the world what it has given to me,&quot; said Bottura. 
 
&quot;We have an opportunity with this project, which is cultural, and not a charitable project, to fight wastefulness. If we change the way people think, we can help give birth to a new tradition,&quot; he told a press conference. 
 
His kitchen team will include French chefs Alain Ducasse and Claude Troisgros, Spain&#39;s Andoni Aduriz and Brazilians Alex Atala, Felipe Bronze, Roberta Sudbrack and Rafa Costa e Silva. They will take turns cooking, setting the menu based on the ingredients available, which will be surplus food, not leftovers. 
 
Rio city hall has granted them the site free of charge for 10 years. After the Olympics and Paralympics, Refettorio Gastromotiva will operate as a culinary institute as well as a regular restaurant. Patrons paying to eat there will also donate a meal to someone in need, under the motto &quot;buy lunch, give dinner,&quot; a spokeswoman said. 
 
Co-founder David Hertz, who runs a &quot;social gastronomy&quot; charity in Brazil called Gastromotiva, said the project is more about changing the way people think than feeding them. 
 
&quot;We had never worked with the issue of food waste before. That&#39;s a legacy we&#39;ll leave,&quot; he said. 
 
The project builds on a similar one, Refettorio Ambrosiano, that Bottura launched last year for the World&#39;s Fair in Milan. He is working on others in Los Angeles, New York and Montreal, to open next year. 
 
(AFP)

Customers pay ?220 for Bottura's signature dish, but in Rio they won't pay a cent. The cultural project aims to tackle ills of waste

Restaurant-goers usually pay hundreds of Euros to eat the creations of Massimo Bottura, but he will be serving poor Brazilians for free at the Olympics. The 53-year-old Italian modernist chef owns Osteria Francescana in Modena, rated best in the world by Restaurant magazine this year. He is known for dishes such as "An eel swimming up the Po River", or eel with polenta, Campanie apple jelly, burnt saba onion and charcoal salt. It will set you back 220 Euros at his restaurant, which has three Michelin stars. In Rio de Janeiro, Bottura will be serving up scraps, and his customers won't pay a cent. The idea is to tackle the twin social ills of waste and poverty with one creative, delicious project, set against the backdrop of Rio de Janeiro's lush landscapes amid the excitement of the Olympics. Bottura's ingredients will be garbage-bound surplus food donated by the catering companies at the Olympic park and athletes' village. He and a team of celebrity chefs plan to use that to make some 5,000 meals for some of the most "vulnerable" people in Brazil, a country plagued by poverty and inequality. Their restaurant, called Refettorio Gastromotiva, will open Monday in the trendy Lapa neighborhood. The 108-seat restaurant is funded by corporate sponsors. Customers will be chosen by charities working in Rio's poorest neighbourhoods. Doing mom proud The restaurant was decorated by renowned Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, with furniture designed by the Campana brothers, icons of Brazilian design. It is the brainchild of Bottura, Brazilian chef and activist David Hertz and journalist Alexandra Forbes. "I promised my mother I would use my fame to make invisible people visible. The time has come to give back to the world what it has given to me," said Bottura. "We have an opportunity with this project, which is cultural, and not a charitable project, to fight wastefulness. If we change the way people think, we can help give birth to a new tradition," he told a press conference. His kitchen team will include French chefs Alain Ducasse and Claude Troisgros, Spain's Andoni Aduriz and Brazilians Alex Atala, Felipe Bronze, Roberta Sudbrack and Rafa Costa e Silva. They will take turns cooking, setting the menu based on the ingredients available, which will be surplus food, not leftovers. Rio city hall has granted them the site free of charge for 10 years. After the Olympics and Paralympics, Refettorio Gastromotiva will operate as a culinary institute as well as a regular restaurant. Patrons paying to eat there will also donate a meal to someone in need, under the motto "buy lunch, give dinner," a spokeswoman said. Co-founder David Hertz, who runs a "social gastronomy" charity in Brazil called Gastromotiva, said the project is more about changing the way people think than feeding them. "We had never worked with the issue of food waste before. That's a legacy we'll leave," he said. The project builds on a similar one, Refettorio Ambrosiano, that Bottura launched last year for the World's Fair in Milan. He is working on others in Los Angeles, New York and Montreal, to open next year. (AFP)

Michelin chef gives Brazil's poor a taste of the high life

His father wanted him to become a lawyer, and he nearly did. 
 
But Massimo Bottura&#39;s obsession with cooking instead has paid off: his restaurant, the Osteria Francescana, may have put the noses of conservative Italian chefs out of joint, but it now boasts the title &quot;best in the world&quot;. 
 
Set in the heart of Modena in northern Italy, the Osteria already boasted three Michelin stars before it snapped up first prize at the World&#39;s 50 Best Restaurants Awards in June thanks to a creative cuisine that reinvents Italian traditional dishes. 
 
Winning was a &quot;very emotional&quot; experience, Bottura told AFP, though he said one of the main differences between first and second place on the prestigious list was &quot;the number of interviews&quot; he is now asked to give. 
 
With its blue-grey walls, taupe carpet, artworks on the walls and photographs of the singer Edith Piaf, there are just 12 tables and most diners come for the tasting menu, with its 220 Euro ($245) price tag. 
 
The fare may be world class but this osteria does not take itself too seriously. A wax sculpture of a security guard by American artist Duane Hanson startles diners at the front entrance. The levity continues once seated. 
 
Dish names include &quot;An eel swimming up the Po River&quot; and &quot;Yellow is bello&quot;. 
 
Bespectacled Bottura, 53, worked on one of his signature creations, &quot;Memory of a mortadella sandwich&quot;, for four years. 
 
&#39;Follow your palate&#39; : 
 
&quot;I rely on my past, but I look at it critically and without nostalgia&nbsp;because I want to bring the best of the past into the future,&quot; he says. 
 
He says he has always &quot;sought to look at the world from under the table, with the eyes of a child stealing the pasta his grandmother&quot; is making from scratch. 
 
The kitchen -- and the table he hid under while his grandmother fought off his quick-fingered brothers with a rolling pin -- became &quot;my safety place&quot;. 
 
When he was 23-years old Bottura, who was famous for rustling up culinary delights for his friends, dropped his law studies to open a Trattoria in Campazzo, in the countryside around Modena in the Po River Valley. 
 
On his days off, he would study with French chef Georges Cogny, who had a restaurant two hours away. 
 
&quot;He said to me: &#39;always follow your palate&nbsp;because you have a great palate which will make Modena known around the world&#39;.&quot; 
 
Two years and an interlude in New York later, it was another Frenchman that changed his destiny, Alain Ducasse. 
 
After the Provencal food guru came to Bottura&#39;s Trattoria, the Italian ended up going to work for him in Monte Carlo for a time. 
 
Ducasse had a huge influence on him: &quot;He taught me to be obsessed: obsessed with quality ingredients, obsessed with detail&quot;. 
 
Back in Modena in 1995, he opened the Osteria. Never satisfied, he jumped at the chance five years later to learn from another great master, Spanish giant Ferran Adria. 
 
Adria taught Bottura the &quot;freedom to be creative&quot;, to think that &quot;a sardine can be worth as much as a lobster, but it all depends on whose hands it is in.&quot; 
 
&#39;Mouthfuls of passion&#39;: 
 
Bottura begins with local products and messes around with traditional recipes, drawing for inspiration on everything from his childhood kitchen to poetry, art, and music, &quot;compressing my passions into mouthfuls&quot;. 
 
His philosophy and creations at first perplexed and even angered Italy&#39;s culinary old guard. 
 
&quot;It&#39;s ironic, isn&#39;t it? Ten years ago they wanted to string me up in the main square because I &#39;destroyed&#39; our grandmothers&#39; recipes.&quot; 
 
With the world prize in the bag, Bottura turns his mind back to his social projects, particularly his war on food waste. 
 
His next big gig will see him set up a cafeteria in Rio which will transform leftover food from the Olympic Games Village into free meals for the poor living in the Brazilian city&#39;s favelas. 
 
Everything the excitable chef does comes with the support of his American wife Lara Gilmore, who left New York for him and gave the ok ay for his Spanish adventure even though she was pregnant at the time. 
 
&quot;I fell in love with Massimo&#39;s kitchen before actually falling in love with him,&quot; she says. 
 
&quot;He really got me with his creamy velvet artichoke soup.&quot; 
 
(AFP)

His next big gig will be in Rio which will transform leftover food from the Olympic Games Village into free meals for the poor

His father wanted him to become a lawyer, and he nearly did. But Massimo Bottura's obsession with cooking instead has paid off: his restaurant, the Osteria Francescana, may have put the noses of conservative Italian chefs out of joint, but it now boasts the title "best in the world". Set in the heart of Modena in northern Italy, the Osteria already boasted three Michelin stars before it snapped up first prize at the World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards in June thanks to a creative cuisine that reinvents Italian traditional dishes. Winning was a "very emotional" experience, Bottura told AFP, though he said one of the main differences between first and second place on the prestigious list was "the number of interviews" he is now asked to give. With its blue-grey walls, taupe carpet, artworks on the walls and photographs of the singer Edith Piaf, there are just 12 tables and most diners come for the tasting menu, with its 220 Euro ($245) price tag. The fare may be world class but this osteria does not take itself too seriously. A wax sculpture of a security guard by American artist Duane Hanson startles diners at the front entrance. The levity continues once seated. Dish names include "An eel swimming up the Po River" and "Yellow is bello". Bespectacled Bottura, 53, worked on one of his signature creations, "Memory of a mortadella sandwich", for four years. 'Follow your palate' : "I rely on my past, but I look at it critically and without nostalgia because I want to bring the best of the past into the future," he says. He says he has always "sought to look at the world from under the table, with the eyes of a child stealing the pasta his grandmother" is making from scratch. The kitchen -- and the table he hid under while his grandmother fought off his quick-fingered brothers with a rolling pin -- became "my safety place". When he was 23-years old Bottura, who was famous for rustling up culinary delights for his friends, dropped his law studies to open a Trattoria in Campazzo, in the countryside around Modena in the Po River Valley. On his days off, he would study with French chef Georges Cogny, who had a restaurant two hours away. "He said to me: 'always follow your palate because you have a great palate which will make Modena known around the world'." Two years and an interlude in New York later, it was another Frenchman that changed his destiny, Alain Ducasse. After the Provencal food guru came to Bottura's Trattoria, the Italian ended up going to work for him in Monte Carlo for a time. Ducasse had a huge influence on him: "He taught me to be obsessed: obsessed with quality ingredients, obsessed with detail". Back in Modena in 1995, he opened the Osteria. Never satisfied, he jumped at the chance five years later to learn from another great master, Spanish giant Ferran Adria. Adria taught Bottura the "freedom to be creative", to think that "a sardine can be worth as much as a lobster, but it all depends on whose hands it is in." 'Mouthfuls of passion': Bottura begins with local products and messes around with traditional recipes, drawing for inspiration on everything from his childhood kitchen to poetry, art, and music, "compressing my passions into mouthfuls". His philosophy and creations at first perplexed and even angered Italy's culinary old guard. "It's ironic, isn't it? Ten years ago they wanted to string me up in the main square because I 'destroyed' our grandmothers' recipes." With the world prize in the bag, Bottura turns his mind back to his social projects, particularly his war on food waste. His next big gig will see him set up a cafeteria in Rio which will transform leftover food from the Olympic Games Village into free meals for the poor living in the Brazilian city's favelas. Everything the excitable chef does comes with the support of his American wife Lara Gilmore, who left New York for him and gave the ok ay for his Spanish adventure even though she was pregnant at the time. "I fell in love with Massimo's kitchen before actually falling in love with him," she says. "He really got me with his creamy velvet artichoke soup." (AFP)

Meet Massimo Bottura, chef of the world'd best restaurant

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Ferrari opens Michelin-starred restaurant to offer full luxury experience

Michelin chef gives Brazil's poor a taste of the high life

Meet Massimo Bottura, chef of the world'd best restaurant