Niko Romito has won three Michelin stars, self-taught, in just seven years, breaking a kind of record. His training curriculum is quite short: catapulted into the kitchen for life's cases. He did not go to college and instead of spending years climbing the military hierarchy from the rank of commis, he sat at the university benches. It could have been the worst testimonial of professional training never seen, and instead he created "the school he would have liked to have". Since 2011, the Niko Romito Academy, in football terms, is a nursery of under 35 where you train for a career in Serie A. After exactly 10 years, the commitment to training the chef is rewarded by the 2021 Michelin Guide: the prestigious Michelin Chef Mentor Award 2021, offered by Blancpain.

The Romito system, from haute cuisine to fried chicken

Niko Romito is not a guy who is easily satisfied, thinks big, and with great meaning, scalable and multiplicable in always different catering formats. The kitchen of his Reale restaurant in Castel di Sangro (AQ) is part of a system that goes far beyond the few tables set in the middle of the Abruzzo hills: it is a laboratory of ideas, techniques and research, to be then spread in other forms, without changing the substance. Romito speaks of "drip, A process by which the technical work and the reasoning made at Reale percolate into the rest of the system that brings its brand, towards replicable formats and products that, while expressing a philosophy, have a life of their own. Each project is based on the application of techniques and concepts developed by Romito al Reale, rethought to adapt to a donut like a fried chicken: in the Romitian universe, haute cuisine, widespread catering, higher education and products for domestic consumption coexist. There are Spazio restaurants, those of the Bulgari Hotels in Beijing, Shanghai and Dubai, the Alt taste station, the Bomba street food format and the Nutritional Intelligence project in partnership with La Sapienza University and the hospital menu production chain.

The Academy, the forge of human capital

How to handle all this? In Rivisondoli, 688 inhabitants in the province of L'Aquila, since 2011 young promises of catering have occupied the classrooms of theNiko Romito Academy. Sixteen students per course, thirty-two students a year, which generates human capital (Romito is a failed economist) for the group's restaurants and projects, and at the same time spreads an approach with building its own culinary language. After six months of immersive training we leave for a six-month internship, in one of the great's satellites widespread project by Romito. The rates of occupation post graduate students are Bulgarian majority. Hence the decision to entrust him with the prestigious award, with this motivation: «Niko Romito is an example of tenacity and energy and proposes a cuisine whose fundamental trait is the purity of flavors. The young chefs who work alongside him or who attend his school assimilate his philosophy, capture its essence with the aim of giving continuity to his method by customizing it to become great chefs and, in many cases, even young entrepreneur chefs! ".