Massimo Bottura wins two awards in 50 Top Italy 2022

This year Bottura continues to stake this claim with two new titles.

Firstly, his beloved Osteria Francescana won first place on the list of “Best Restaurants in Italy 2022” and Franceschetta 58, a bistro-style restaurant by Bottura also located in Modena, came in second place on the list of “Most Innovative Formats 2022”. 

Decanted and left to breathe in the history-soaked streets and surrounding countryside of Modena, Bottura’s ebullient mind creates recipes that are larger than the sum of their ingredients, embodying tradition and revolution in one bite. 

Image credit: Franceschetta58

One dish found on his award-winning menu at Osteria Francescana, “With a little help from my friends”, uses the title of a Beatles song to pay homage to Bottura’s team, when the chef asked them to prepare recipes at home during the lockdown, inspired by The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

For this dish Bottura uses local ingredients to create a wafer, topped with tomato broth, onion, and parmesan cheese. While it may seem simple, each element from wafer to cheese is the product of hundreds of years of tradition. Using these time-honoured and protected ingredients is quintessentially Italian, but their unique combination? Herein lies the revolution.

This revolutionary spirit is perhaps what led Massimo Bottura to winning second place for “Most Innovative Formats” for his bistro-style restaurant Franceschetta58, where the menu concept embodies Bottura’s rebellious and experimental nature. Featured on their winning menu is one of chef Bottura’s most beloved creations, the Emilia Burger.

Just like Bottura, this burger is a little bit different every time you meet it and is never made with exactly the same things. An experience of delightful surprise of memories with every bite, make this entrée the ideal candidate for innovation and experimentation.

This sensibility towards adaptation and using local ingredients embodied in Massimo Bottura’s menu coalesces intuitively with his passion for fighting food waste. One of his most famous interventions was during the Milan Expo in 2015 where, using 15 tonnes of food salvaged from the exposition, Bottura and 65 of the world’s most renowned chefs created hundreds of meals for the city’s poor and underserved. 

These initiatives of turning a potential loss into nutritional love expose Bottura’s passion for food and the people he feeds as stretching far beyond the doors, tables, or kitchens of his restaurants. No matter which restaurant of Bottura’s you visit, every experience encapsulates some memory, some emotion, big or small, that will remain with you long after the food is gone. Bottura’s fans will be thrilled to know that only very recently,  Bottura opened the doors of his latest restaurant, Gucci Osteria, in Tokyo, Japan, where two food-obsessed cultures enter in a flirtatious dance to a delicious end. 

So whether for his 3-star Michelin restaurant, Osteria Francescana, or his bistro-style eatery, Franceschetta58, or his newest opening in Tokyo, ​​there are always hints of both, the traditional and conceptual. The menu can seem deceivingly minimalist in its presentation and yet full of complex flavours, textures and cultural references to art, literature and history.

You can join Massimo Bottura in 2022 for a 3 night Hosted Experience in Modena, including a private dining experience at Osteria Francescana, dinner at Francescana as well as a masterclass with Massimo and his team, while staying at his countryside boutique hotel Casa Maria Luigia. During your experience in Emilia Romagna, you will also get to visit Il Tortellante, Bottura’s social enterprise championing ideals that underpin its operation, from fighting food waste, integrating all individuals and empowering local communities to support themselves and each other. 

If you’d like to hear from Massimo, why We Must Continue to Dream, watch his interview from the Dare to Dream series by Satopia Travel.