The Best Chef Top 100 new candidates: Luca Fantin
The Best Chef Top 100 new candidates: Luca Fantin
The Best Chef Top 100 new candidates: Luca Fantin
Based in Tokyo since 2009, Luca’s career was founded in some of the world’s top-ranked restaurants,including La Pergola in Rome, where he was sous chef under Heinz Beck.
His style is a contemporary interpretation of traditional Italian cuisine, while he uses top-quality local Japanese produce to create his vision. Elaborating classic recipes with refined techniques and distinctive creativity, he prefers slow cooking at low temperatures rather than sautéing ingredients, creating a fare that is extremely light and thoroughly authentic. With refined distinction, he is known to use herbs and edible flowers such as borage, calendula, or rosemary to flavour his dishes.
His culinary creativity is inspired by the changing seasons. His summer-inspiration includes roasts Baked Rosy Sea Bass with Herbs and Tarragon, a masterpiece of simplicity, as the herbs and fennel are oven-baked alongside the sea bass to recreate the warm aromas of wild grass and parched earth. Served with a tarragon green sauce, shallots and white balsamic vinegar, the dish is accompanied by tarragon puree and fried fish scales for a lush dose of summery texture. For autumn, Homemade Tagliatelle with Raw Lobster is on the menu, featuring exceptional products such as Japanese spiny lobster to act as the decadent meal protagonist. Every morsel of the luxurious crustacean’s shell, head and bits are used to make a concentrated yet simple broth to be stirred into the pasta. Meanwhile, the homemade tagliatelle plays an exquisite supporting actor, expressing the flavour of the lobster within its fresh Italian textures. Moving into winter, cosy Risotto with Radicchio and a Red Wine Sauce provides the stronger flavours and richer colours that characterise the chilliest season, but also recall the delectable dishes from Fantin’s childhood home in Treviso. Blending the textures of Japanese-grown radicchio and rice, the salad’s bitter notes echo of their Italian equivalent, while the delicacy of the risotto reminds of the Mediterranean homeland that inspired the combination. Heralding the season of abundance and of transition, the spring menu introduces a lot of green as the tubers are replaces by asparagus, green pea flowers and herbs such as verbena,marigold and sage. The Asparagus with Bottarga and Eggs revisits the classic marriage of asparagus and egg yolks whilst the lamb with chicory and zucchini flowers presents a bucolic and extremely complex dish.
Since 2011 Luca Fantin has been awarded one Michelin star and he is the first Italian chef in Japan to have received such prestigious recognition.
Since 2014 he has taken part in Epicurea, the global gourmet festival at the Bulgari Hotel in Milan, where the world’s most prestigious chefs – such as René Redzepi, Virgilio Martinez, Yoshihiro Narisawa – present a special menu in the Bulgari Hotel.
In 2014, Luca Fantin was awarded “Best Italian Chef in the World” by the prestigious Italian culinary guide Identità Golose, presented by Paolo Marchi, the founder of the guide.
Luca Fantin also brought the Epicurea food festival to Tokyo, welcoming top chefs from around the world such as Massimo Bottura, Andoni Luis Aduriz, Carlo Cracco and Rodolfo Guzman.
In 2016 and 2017 he was awarded best Italian restaurant in the world by Gambero Rosso restaurant guide.
As well he was included in the “Diners Club® 50 Best Discovery Series” in Asia.
In 2019, the restaurant ranked in Asia’s 50Best Restaurant 2019list, at number 18 prodigious feat moving up by 10 from the previous year. And the same year nominated “Restaurant of the Year” and Three Forks by “Gambero Rosso2020”2019- Luca Fantin celebrated his 10th anniversary as an executive chef at the restaurant in Tokyo.
With the publishing of his new beautiful, illustrated book and its luxury slipcase, LA CUCINA DI LUCA FANTIN, foodies from all over the world are now able to discover his delectable creativities at home.
Published by ASSOULINE, the book seems the start of an exquisite culinary collection, and it features thirty-two of Fantin’s original, delectable recipes. A sophisticated, stunning coffee-table book, its pages gleam with original photography as they detail Luca’s inspiration for each dish.
Vignetta The Animismus
