Andrea Aprea **

"My interest is to offer a contemporary Italian cuisine, Contemporary can be interpreted as 'able to read the present', whatever it may be. And the present – as we have seen in the last year and a half – is changeable and unpredictable."
 
Born in Naples, Andrea’s cooking has Neapolitan dishes and products at is core, but uses the best ingredients in the Italian peninsula to create a taste journey which pays tribute to Italian cuisine. Andrea looks to overcome academic conflicts and break away from the rhetoric of traditions when he creates his food. His aim is to go beyond innovation and modernity, and devote himself to the idea of contemporaneity, mixing technique with experience, emotion with culture and aesthetics with precise taste.
 
“What we have always called tradition is our ancestors’ present – an enduring present even as time and fashion pass, reaching us in an absolute way.
Contemporaneity, instead, is the ability of interpreting the spirit of our time, building a theory about the future on it.”
 
Andrea Aprea gained the restaurant its first Michelin star in 2013 and its second Michelin star in 2018. His cuisine takes inspiration from experiences he has had in several cities around the world, including London, Kuala Lumpur, Ravello, Florence and Lake of Garda, amongst others.
His strengths lie in technique and innovation. Combining this with simplicity and respect for traditional Italian cooking and the terror, Andrea creates an environment which spotlights the food as the protagonist.
 
His dishes are a dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity says Andrea, “We can find in each dish more of one or more of the other, or sometimes they are both melted in a unique experience. These flavors that already belong to us, in our memories, but now they meet our senses in an unexpected way.”
Andrea focuses on the raw materials, as he believes these form the basis of every experience; they encapsulate the knowledge of the territory and of the local gastronomic culture. The harmony that exists between tradition and the unique food of Italy allows Andrea to bring both flavors and places to the plate, building tales about landscapes through taste.  These stories are intended to surprise and delight the tastebuds, with unexpected elements hidden in the plate to deliver a natural experience.