Daccapo Chef Davide Carboni's Love Affair with Italian Cuisine

Davide Carboni fell in love at the age of 11. But this was no ordinary preteen crush, Carboni fell in love when he first learned to cook. In is culinary debut, back home in Rome, he attempted perhaps the most iconic of Italian pastas – carbonara. "It was the first dish I learned to cook, my first love, and the main reason I came into this job,” he remembers.
 
Two decades later, Daccapo’s new Chef de Cuisine has come a long way along the culinary road.

 
Upon leaving school, he continued his culinary education at Rome’s Boscolo Etoile Academy, combining studies in cooking with winemaking and viticulture, which he subsequently advanced in with sommelier certification from the Worldwide Sommelier Association.
 
Like many aspiring young chefs, he was determined to go his own way at an early age, becoming chef and owner of his own Italian restaurant, Il Pensiero, from 2011 to 2013. For one reason or another, like many chefs inevitably discover, he was forced to move on and sought to broaden his culinary horizons internationally.

 
He first ventured overseas as Chef de Partie at one of the most glamorous restaurants in the Middle East, Armani Hotel Dubai’s Armani Ristorante, the pinnacle of Italian fine dining. During his two-year spell there it was voted Best Italian Restaurant in the Middle East by Time Out, and Best Italian Restaurant in the Caterer Awards.  
 
He moved to China in 2015, rising up the kitchen ranks for his first appointment as Chef de Cuisine, joining the opening team of Changzhou Marriott Hotel to launch Tuscany Grill. Now helming his own kitchen, his reputation continued to grow. The restaurant attracted rave reviews as the city’s most admired Italian dining destination.
 
His passion for traditional Italian cuisine now remains as loyal as ever as he breathes new life into the award-winning Italian fine dining restaurant at Regent Beijing. On his menu is classic Roman cuisine, along with Tuscan specialties, in a style he describes as “traditional and healthy.”

 
“I have not created a “new” cooking style,” he says. “I’m just rediscovering the traditional approach to Italian cuisine, where every single ingredient should be fresh and cooked as little as possible. In addition, it makes the whole dining experience healthy, since the cooking requires minimum fat and salt.”
 
It’s all in the detail, he says. “I reserve the greatest care for the ‘small’ ingredients: extra virgin olive oil, salt, colatura di alici (a special seasoning made with anchovy water) and vinegar. They represent the real soul of my cuisine; a single drop of traditional Modena balsamic, aged 18 years in wooden barrels in the same way it has been done for over a thousand years, can drastically change any dish. For example, [it can] elevate a ‘simple’ caprese salad into something that guests have never experienced before.”

As for signature dishes, he is reluctant to name any “since I love every single dish I prepare.” But if pushed, he admits: “If I have to choose something, it would probably be homemade pasta. It’s the most Italian dish, despite what the whole world says about pizza. A real Italian will tell you that pasta is the Italian flag-carrier, not pizza, and homemade pasta is a lost art that I want to keep alive.”

 
Among meats, he is also a great fan of ‘tomahawk’, a monster bone-in ribeye cut of beef known as costata in Italy. For many, this is the ultimate steak, with incredible marbling and mellow flavor from aging.

 
“I learned how to really appreciate it during my first experience in China,” he says. “I found this treasure from Robbins Island, a small island off the coast of south-east Australia, close to Tasmania, where the beef stock has been raised naturally and refined by the same family for the past 80 years.” Whether served as a carpaccio appetizer, with a drop of Modena balsamic, or grilled on a piping-hot Himalayan salt stone, he promises “one of the best steaks of your life.”
 
And what of his first love – his beloved carbonara? With 20 years of sophistication and passion thrown in, his modern reincarnation is ravioli stuffed with carbonara sauce in a black pepper reduction with crunchy bacon.

It might be said that of all the dishes on his rich repertoire, this is Davide Carboni’s history on a plate.

2/F, Regent Beijing, 99 Jinbao Jie, Dongcheng District 金宝街99号丽晶酒店2楼 (8522 1888-3826)