MILAN — Matteo Panfilio sounded relaxed when dialing in on Monday. The first week of the Venice Film Festival — always the busiest, he said — is behind him, and it’s all downhill from now on.
Not that the executive chef of the Aman Venice hotel, one of the city’s most exclusive hospitality addresses, lacks stamina. Affable yet straightforward, Panfilio is an outdoorsy type. His best cuisine intuitions and concoctions served as part of the hotel’s fine-dining experience stem not from standing at the stovetop but from plenty of solo time spent pedaling his bicycle across Italian hilltops — music in the ears, pulse racing fast and nature all around him.
“I do it to free my mind,” Panfilio says about his intensive training sessions. “When you’re there, pedaling upward alone, you think about new things, about how to face some worries, and you solve problems. I get a lot of ideas for work, about dishes and pairings. It’s a way to meditate, to carve time to think — undisturbed. I turn off my phone, turn off everything, and just go on my way.”
This kind of meditation-on-the-move, and the patience and consistency the sport requires, naturally informed the discipline he applies in his profession. “It’s all in your mind. Sure, legs are needed to move the pedals but 80 percent of cycling happens in your head, because the effort is too much, it’s pure pain…and when your body wants to give in, the head has to shut it up and get you through a race,” Panfilio says.
“A race is a goal, which you need to stay consistent, otherwise you just give up training altogether. And the same happens in the kitchen,” continues the chef, pointing to the importance of always pushing experimentation to come up with new ideas for a menu.
For Panfilio, cycling is as much a passion as cuisine, and both trace back to his childhood. Born in 1987, he’s originally from Tortona, in the Piedmont region and a 25-minute drive from Castellania, where Italian cycling legend Fausto Coppi hailed from. It was only natural for young Panfilio to pick up a bike — that is when he was not busy helping his grandmothers and mother in the kitchen.
“We’ve always cooked together, ever since I was a little kid, from making ravioli on Sundays to cooking the chickens from our own farm in the countryside and picking up the fruits and vegetables from our garden,” he says. “So I was always taught how to prepare food. It’s a passion passed down, whether I liked it or not. And actually I really enjoy myself while cooking; I have fun, especially when I do it for others.”
When Panfilio moved alone to Genoa during high school to study cuisine and patisserie, starting his many internships in the hospitality sector and piling up experiences at a young age, cuisine took over and cycling had to take a step back. After graduation and stints at luxury hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants such as Hotel Metropole’s Bellevue restaurant in Taormina, Panfilio moved to London, working under the guidance of the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Tristan Mason and Alberico Penati.
“I started as pastry chef, because I had a passion for sweets. I love them — that’s why I train so much,” he quips. “Then I asked to be moved to the other side of the kitchen to learn [to do everything].”
Upon his return to Italy he opened the La Locanda dei Narcisi gourmet destination a three-hour-drive from Tortona — now managed by his mother — and worked, among others, under the acclaimed Cerea brothers at their three Michelin-starred restaurant Da Vittorio, nestled in another area where cycling is part of the local culture.
“I spent several years with them and they taught me so much: hospitality and tradition above all,” Panfilio says. “It was there that I learned how to combine traditional cuisine, which they are very attached to, with experimentation. Therefore infusing a little bit of lightness to some classics.”
“Michelin-starred restaurants teach you how to work. It’s not just about making a good dish. They actually teach you the approach, the seriousness, the professionalism, the dedication, the manners. Cooking is like going into the army: order, precision, planning — you don’t just go by instinct in the kitchen,” he continues. “Also because you have so many responsibilities: after all, we feed people. We have to create, while always being super precise, clean and tidy because hygiene is important and you can’t leave things to chance. There’s always a lot of training, you keep studying and passing down learnings to the younger folks.”
It was at his time at Da Vittorio that his sport passion rekindled and infiltrated back into his routine, and by the time Panfilio joined Aman Venice in 2021, he brought both his cooking and intensive training schedule to the lagoon.
“I try to train at least four to five times per week — early mornings, before work, for an hour and a half. I have a specific program and I’m being assisted by a coach,” says Panfilio, who’s also an avid runner.
Attention to balanced nutrition became paramount both at home and in his work. Panfilio’s countryside roots, penchant for seasonal raw materials and locally sourced ingredients, inform the light and inventive menu of Aman Venice’s restaurant Arva, named after the Latin term for “cultivated land.”
Inspired by Venice with influences from Piedmont and Sicily, the native region of Panfilio’s grandmother, recipes are based on produce sourced around the lagoon, ranging from fine seafood to fresh veggies, which the chef has a knack for.
The most requested dishes include Panfilio’s revisitation of a Bellini: a pink prawns tartare topped with a foam of peach gazpacho, served in a glass cup and flanked with its cicchetto (the quintessentially Venetian small bite) made of a prawn croquette.
Other popular choices are the ravioli stuffed with lobster and served with tarragon pesto sauce and bisque foam; the seafood and basil risotto, and the puff pastry millefeuille filled with eggplant cream and coming with tomato panzanella salad and Espelette pepper.
“I cook only what I personally like. Luckily there are just few ingredients I don’t like, but those don’t get even to the kitchen counter. At the end, the guest is here to give my viewpoint on cuisine a try, not demand what he wants,” says Panfilio, whose own favorite dish is the trofie pasta with pesto.
Compared to the other restaurants of the Aman group, Arva is open to both hotel and outside guests, who can access and dine in one of the sumptuous halls of the lavish 16th-century Palazzo Papadopoli housing Aman Venice. For an even more private experience, the Palazzo Kitchen Table offers a unique dining space to watch Panfilio as he assembles a special, seven-course tasting menu.
For those interested in a more hands-on approach, cooking classes are also offered to groups of four to five people. They include an early-morning stroll to the market of Rialto with the chef to source fresh ingredients, before heading back to the kitchen and create three recipes with him, all intended to be replicated at home.
Panfilio additionally oversees a different, light lunch menu that is served outdoors, in the canal-side garden that is one of the many assets of the hotel. This space has also been revamped over the summer with a dedicated bar, which adds to The Bar space in the palazzo’s charming Red Room, replete with silk coverings lining the walls and an original fresco by Cesare Rotta framing the ceiling.
Inspired by English poet Lord Byron, the bar serves cocktails curated by Aman Venice’s head barman and award-winning mixologist Antonio Ferrara. Recently introduced, his new list “Riflessioni” includes six creations, each dedicated to a hall of the palazzo, ranging from the rum sour “Armonia” paying tribute to the Red Room to “Meditazione,” nodding to the Blue Room with its blend of Champagne, gin, verbena and the Venturo liquor based on mint and chamomile.
This introduction closely followed the revamp of the spa’s catalogue, too. Hidden on a third-floor mezzanine within the palazzo, the intimate space offering massages and treatments inspired by both Asian healing practices and Italian traditional rituals was enriched by new services, spanning from cryotherapy to express facials intended to fight jet-leg.
