Who Are Venissa Chef Francesco Brutto’s Favourite Chefs?

For Francesco Brutto, Michelin stars are apparently not sufficient. The food still has to rock.

The Italian chef from Venissa, the Michelin-starred restaurant on Mazzorbo in the Venetian lagoon, was in Cairo for the fourth edition of Cairo Food Week, taking his cucina ambientale philosophy into Mazeej Balad’s kitchen for one of the programme’s international chef takeovers. Venissa, which Brutto leads alongside his wife Chiara Pavan, holds both a Michelin Star and Green Michelin Star for cooking rooted in the lagoon, its biodiversity and the environmental pressures reshaping it.

For Scene Eats’ Your Favourite Chef’s Favourite Chefs, however, Brutto turned his attention to three other Italian cooks.

First is Mauro Uliassi, whose eponymous restaurant sits on the Adriatic shoreline in Senigallia and holds three Michelin stars. Brutto’s reasoning is considerably less ceremonial: despite the accolades, Uliassi “still keeps on rocking with the flavour, with the texture of the food.” Then comes Gianluca Gorini of Da Gorini in Emilia-Romagna, whose cooking draws on the region while pushing beyond it. What Brutto remembers most, though, is the man himself, describing Gorini as “one of the most distinctive people that I ever met.”

His final choice is Andrea Capasso, the Italian-born Executive Chef of Paris’ two-Michelin-starred Le Clarence, who took over the kitchen in 2025 after six years at the restaurant. For Brutto, Capasso’s gift is deceptively simple: knowing exactly what to do with an ingredient. He calls him “the most clever and talented chef” when it comes to using ingredients “in the perfect way.”

Three chefs, then, admired for three rather different qualities: flavour that survives the accolades, a personality impossible to confuse with anybody else’s, and the intelligence to know when an ingredient needs more—and when it doesn’t.