Food & Beverage · 2022
Luciano Monosilio is one of the most recognisable Roman cooks of his generation. His restaurant, Luciano Cucina Italiana, sits a few steps from Campo de’ Fiori, in a room built around a precise idea: to codify Italian tradition with technical rigour and make it accessible without dismantling its meaning. The pasta is made on site, in a small workshop in the basement; the menu turns on seasonality and on raw materials chosen with the kind of attention fine dining usually reserves for other contexts.
The work covers portraits of the chef, the interiors of the restaurant and the food itself. I looked for an approach that would carry the same tension you feel in Luciano’s kitchen: precision of gesture, clarity of the ingredient, an elegance with no ornament. For each dish I built a set that staged the raw material as part of the story — rings of raw onion, opened mussels, clams and seaweed, yellow datterini. Each photograph tries to tell the dish before it shows it.
