Chef Francesco Magro: An Italian schoolboy’s spaghetti adventure turns him into top Dubai chef
Learn to make pasta from scratch with Michelin-recognised chef
This is the story of an 11-year-old Italian boy. Growing up in the sun-dappled, cobbled city of Nova Milanese of Italy, he was happy. Life was good. Until one fated day.
It was late afternoon; Francesco Magro reached home from school. He was hungry. His Mum would prepare and leave lunch for him, before she left for her work in a school cafeteria. He ate up what was there, delicious as always, but he was still ravenous. He was not allowed to turn on the gas in the absence of his parents.
However, there was no arguing with the rumble in an 11-year-old’s tummy. He switched on the cooker, put on a pot of water and as it boiled, he added one strand of spaghetti. Would it cook? Would it taste okay?
Magro taste tested the strand of spaghetti. Fine. It had cooked perfectly. He added the rest of the spaghetti in. Cooked, strained it in a colander, added olive oil and piles of parmesan cheese. Mixed it all up and took a mouthful. It was “magic”. Fate had opened up a path, a journey of culinary enchantment.
“For me kitchen is like magic… you take ingredients, you cook, and the process of cooking and the process of adding other ingredients, you can decide what will be the last result. If you want it savoury or if you want it to be sour or sweet, you play. The spaghetti with parmesan that I made for myself was my first successful dish,” explained Magro, head chef at Michelin-recognised and Gault & Millau two-toque awarded Italian restaurant The Artisan in Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Dubai International Financial Centre.
While Michelin looks at an overall experience, Gault & Millau is extremely food quality focused.
“It’s like magic when you get the result and you obtain what you start with as an idea, say for example to make a risotto that will have a strong flavour of lime and zucchini. You put the zucchini, start cooking and the last result is exactly how you imagined it, and then it is wow!
“Then when somebody else tastes it and says ‘wow’, then it is a double wow!
“You get this feeling that is everything. When I cook, I imagine the feeling the guest is having when eating it. That is also the secret behind cooking… every time you don’t just cook; you make food for someone to be able to appreciate what you make. Of course you cannot make everyone happy but this is the goal - to make everyone happy.”
After that day, Magro told his Mum that he would make his own lunch but requested her to teach him some more recipes. At the age of 15, he joined a culinary school in Monza, an Italian city famed for its Formula 1 circuit.
“My family always supported every decision I took in my life. One of my professors at culinary school had his own catering company. After school, I would go and help there.
“It was a very different experience as a kitchen chef compared to cooking with Mum. When you cook at home, of course you make small amounts of food and in an easy way. You have fun. When you have to work, there is some fun but you also need to be focused and precise. Many people say I know how to cook. However, it is very different to be a cook at home and a chef in a restaurant. At home, you prepare your meal, you have all the time to do it and then you sit and eat it. When you are a chef, you have two hours to feed many people, you need to prepare a lot of food, you need to be focused, and everything needs to be perfect. It is a very intense job – big difference between cooking well and being a chef.
“I never regret this path – since the beginning, I consider myself lucky. At my culinary school, all the professors explained that this is a job where you need to sacrifice a lot of time for, there will be no holiday, no family, and it will take your life. I was always ready to do it.”
Occasionally, the demanding nature of the job does get tough. “Now I have my own family with my wife Renata and daughter Leonora, it is a little bit hard … every Christmas, Easter and New Year’s Eve they celebrate without me, because I am in the restaurant. But, I never regretted what I chose, because I get to follow my passion.”
'It was a very different experience as a kitchen chef compared to cooking with Mum. When you cook at home, of course you make small amounts of food and in an easy way. You have fun. When you have to work, there is some fun but you also need to be focused and precise. Many people say I know how to cook. However, it is very different to be a cook at home and a chef in a restaurant. At home, you prepare your meal, you have all the time to do it and then you sit and eat it. When you are a chef, you have two hours to feed many people, you need to prepare a lot of food, you need to be focused, and everything needs to be perfect. It is a very intense job – big difference between cooking well and being a chef.
For the 31-year-old chef, it has been a journey covering 16 years in the pursuit of learning and excellence. After completing his culinary school, at the age of 20, Magro joined a famous restaurant in Monza called St Georges Premier.
“It was the kitchen of Napoleon Bonaparte [first emperor of France and king of Italy]. When he came from France to Milan, he built his own villa in Monza Park. It is a very big and closed park. He used to go hunting in this park. He would bring the animal to the private kitchen there and they were cooking it for him. Fifty years’ ago they gave this restaurant to the municipality, which built a restaurant; I worked there for 2 to 3 years. Then I was feeling that I needed to leave Italy, to see what was around.”
He moved to Germany and worked for a year in the kitchen of a Michelin-recognised Italian restaurant followed by six months at another Italian restaurant in Antwerp, Belgium. “After that I moved to Dubai in 2015. When I arrived, I started working in At.Mosphere restaurant in Burj Khalifa. I was the Chef de Partie.”
Here are two recipes you can try from Chef Magro:
Within a year of his arrival, the Chef de Cuisine left and Magro became head chef. “It was the first time I was in a kitchen that was not full of Italians …worked with a full team with different nationalities for the first time.”
He then moved to Address Boulevard, where he worked for a year. During this time, he met his girlfriend and now wife, Renata, who is of Russian origin.
“At the time she was working part-time and I was too. It was a birthday party. I was cooking. She was part of the waiting staff team for the day. It was a coincidence. In fact, she didn’t want to come that day. This was 2017.”
He moved to Luxembourg with her and then went back to Milan in Italy. Soon they got married.
“Seeing Russian culture, I felt the difference in what food means to different people. In Italy, you do lunch and dinner, it’s part of my family’s culture … it is part of the concept of being Italian. Because for an Italian food is not just something you eat to feed yourself. It is emotion. Like the chance to meet someone you want to meet. You want to meet your relatives, you organise a lunch or dinner. You do a business meeting, you go for lunch.
“I see from the Russian experience they don’t take the meal as a chance to meet someone. Instead, they go out for a coffee - that’s a chance to meet.”
In 2019, they came back to Dubai. “We are thinking Dubai is the city of possibilities. I joined The Artisan as sous chef, and after two years took over the kitchen, as the head chef in 2021. The next year was very successful year because the Michelin Guide and Guilt and Millau came to Dubai.
“Recognition is very important, every chef doing this job is dreaming of a Michelin star. It is an opportunity that Dubai is giving every chef …. The Michelin guide recognition and 2 toques by Gault & Millau [for The Artisan] – was very successful.”
Thrilled though he might be by the recognition, he feels there’s a long way to go. “It was a rollercoaster of feelings and emotions the recognition, been doing this for almost 20 years. I feel that still the road is long. I am only 31 years old, still many things to learn, places to see. I feel I am still only half the way.
“My dream is to be like my icon, my head chef from the restaurant in Germany – Chef Bruno. He is the chef I want to be. He was around 50 years old then. I have never seen a chef with his calmness. Anything happens in the kitchen, he is calm. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave.”
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