Roberto Parato
The route here
Roberto Parato entered his first professional kitchen in June 1994, aged seventeen, as a trainee in a seaside hotel near Naples. It became the beginning of a career across restaurants, hotels, professional teaching and private villas.
He learned the trade the way it was learned then: one position at a time, from the bottom. Apprentice in Imola and Milano Marittima. Sole cook at a restaurant in Radda in Chianti at twenty-two, responsible for every pasta and every main course that left the kitchen. Then Siena, which became his professional home: chef de partie at the Park Hotel for almost three years, and from 2002 sous chef acting as head chef at the Grand Hotel Continental, the city's five-star hotel.
In August 2004 he was given both hotels. Executive chef of the Grand Hotel Continental and the Park Hotel at the same time: two brigades, two restaurants, banqueting, business lunches, poolside service. He was twenty-seven.
A chef who is also a teacher
In December 2005 he made a choice few chefs make: he started teaching. First at Castelfiorentino, for seven and a half years. Then Città di Castello, Chianciano, Spoleto (including the prison section, where teaching people to cook means something else entirely) and Figline Valdarno. In 2014 he earned his teaching qualification at the University of Pisa, scoring 96 out of 100. Since 2019 he has taught professional cookery at an Italian catering college, where he heads the technical and vocational department and runs the students' work placement programme.
Teaching never took him out of the kitchen. In the summers of 2013, 2014 and 2015 he ran the kitchens of Resort La Bagnaia, the five-star property at Murlo, across the golf restaurant, the à la carte room, the pool and the banqueting service. For seven years he worked with a catering supply company, handling staff, suppliers and sourcing. He has been on the Tuscany regional register of sector experts since 2018.
Cooking and teaching require different skills. For twenty years Roberto has worked beside students at different levels, learning how to explain a gesture and help someone reproduce it. That is why the two experiences belong together: the dinners draw on his work as a chef, and the classes on his work as a teacher.
Why a villa and not a restaurant
I started cooking at seventeen. I worked in the hotels of Siena, led two kitchen brigades at the same time and have spent twenty years teaching this profession to young cooks. In a private home the kitchen remains connected to the table, and that closeness is the part of the work I value most.
He cooks Tuscan and Campanian food: the land he lives in and the land he comes from. He holds an HACCP certificate and trained in low-temperature cooking. He speaks English.
Today he cooks in the houses and villas of Tuscany, for the people who come here on holiday. He says it is the part of the job he likes most, because you can hear people talking, and you can see who gets up to help.
How he works, and what he does not do
Roberto leads every service himself. He accepts menus and formats only when the kitchen and the equipment allow them to be delivered safely and well; requests outside that standard are reviewed before confirmation.
The verifiable part
- Roberto Chef · Roberto Parato
- VAT no. 01621570520
- Siena, Tuscany
- +39 366 456 0063
- HACCP food safety certificate
- Listed on the Tuscany regional register of sector experts since 2018
- On air with Striscia la Notizia (Canale 5, Mediaset): a recovery dish made from kitchen scraps, cooked with his students at the Ricasoli institute. Watch the clip
