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My name is Sarah Cicolini. I was born on 2nd July 1988 in Abruzzo, and I am a chef. I really am, it’s not just a job. I did not study to be a chef, I learned to be.

I grew up in the country, going to pick up veggies with my grandpa either on sunny or rainy days, and this make me started to acknowledge the importance and the care of the good food. Caring for something and protecting somebody is a huge trait of my nature: I was the first child of two young parents, and the first niece of four young grandparents, also I am the eldest of three children (a brother and a sister) and my family is an essential to me. This particular feature for caring made me think about curing people, that’s why I choose to attend medical school. But i never graduated: when I was 23, it was clear to me that, despite my inclination towards cure and protection, being a doctor wasn’t really my thing.

There was something different to explicit my sense of taking care of people, and that was working in the kitchen.

I already had worked in some restaurants on the Abruzzo coast (a typical Italian working tradition for young people) and I decided to be a private chef to sustain the costs of my medical studies. It helped a lot and also it made me think that it was actually what I wanted to be. But it was hard to gain accountability in professional kitchens: I wasn’t coming from kitchen schools, I had small knowledge of kitchen techniques, and I didn’t list starred interships on my CV. I was just a 23-year-old woman who wanted to pursuit her personal inclination and her dream of cooking for people, and to do so you need to be humble, open-minded and fast to learn. You observe, you watch, you ask, this is how you learn, this is what I did.


I started professionally as a chef for a tapas bar that no longer exists, and it was the greatest training: the owners believed in me, they bet on my skills and gave me a lot of freedom in the kitchen, I will always be grateful to them. But I needed more, I needed to be guided through techniques and especially on how to be a manager in your own kitchen. As fate would, I came to know that chef Roy Caceres, then one Michelin star with his restaurant Metamorfosi, was looking for employees for the summer, he needed to replace people doing their internship abroad. I was available for any extra and I was ready, and it was the greatest school I could have ever asked for. Then I became the second chef to Stefano Callegari, the man behind Trapizzino and one of the most celebrated pizza chef in Rome, who needed someone for appetizers and fried foods. He taught me not only to follow the seasons in the kitchen, but also how to plan a menu and make it functional and desirable. These experiences were the best to learn the meaning of being a chef, a leader and a chief: it’s all about love and being there. It’s caring about them in every aspect of their working life. Moods, jokes, personal issues, how to push them or stop them when it’s needed. If you don’t love the people you work with, you work bad. I wanted to put all this love into something that was completely mine. On 30th April 2017, I opened SantoPalato, my restaurant and my laboratory.

 

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How do you start to cook? It looks simple: take a pan, light the gas, put some oil and go. Well, if only cooking was that easy… Of course it is a start, but when you are a chef, there is something else. What flavors am I looking for? What choices I want to make and what I want to keep out of my range? What do I want to communicate to people? Questions, a lot of questions.

My approach to food is pure and holistic: good raw materials, zero waste,  retrieving and updating the amazing traditional recipes of the center of Italy.

But you need good raw materials to start with, and to do so you must know who is your farmer and how they work in the field. And you must understand that seasonality is not marketing, it’s life: you can’t ask for strawberries in January if you want to respect the Nature, that’s why you need to know how the calendar works and the cycle of veggies during the year. The same goes for meat and fish: not only they have their own seasonality, but you must understand not to waste any single fiber and use them all to create broths, sauces, and cooking juices. 

 

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But there is something more. Cooking is not only lighting the fire, puting a pan on, and mixing up ingredients. Cooking and food are multitude, they encompass elements from various disciplines, and are feed by personal experiences and taste.

Sports, books, interests such as fashion, science, style, travelling, they all also shape the way you will finally approach to your work and the people you decide to collaborate with.

Disciplines and inspirations can come from different areas: running at dawn through the Fori Imperiali can give you the sense of infinite you need to finalize a dish. Even going shopping contributes to enhance every aspect of your unique style: fashion, art and design are the basics to find inspirations while your brain is immersed into figurative elements, and subtly refreshes itself thanks to colors, shapes and beauty. Also, if you want to grow as a chef, going out to eat is mandatory.

Not joking: you can only learn by tasting from the best of what (and who) is around.

I strongly believe in shaping your taste by experimenting everything possible, trying to understand flavors and copying special cooking gestures, and I think that having a friendly relationship is the main start for great collaborations. In Rome, I found similar approaches and ideas of cooking into my friends Giorgia Proia and Daniele Antonelli (Casa Manfredi), Tiziano and Mirko Palucci (Barred), Jacopo Mercuro (180 grammi), Alessandro Miocchi and Giuseppe Lo Iudice (Retrobottega), with whom I had great 4 hands experiences and collaborations, and I have a special place in my heart for my friends Arcangelo and Pascal Tinari (Villa Maiella, 1 Michelin star restaurant close to my hometown). Since I think travelling and discovering cooking cultures from abroad is incredibly important, I had the lovely opportunity to cooky my dishes and meet wonderful minds and people across Taiwan, Australia, Canada and Paris. All these were amazing experiences that made me profoundly fond of exploring places, foods and techniques, and also gave me the strong features to love this incredible job, lifestyle and being.