It is an unusual path that leads Nino Rossi to meet haute cuisine: it begins with banquets and weddings. Nino however, while working for the organization of events, dreams of working in the kitchen and begins to study as an autodidact.
In the meantime he continues with the management and catering for events, but opens Villa Rossi, determined to pursue a career as a chef. In 2013, he moved to the Arthhaus Hotel in Davos where he installed himself in the kitchen during the absence of events in Calabria. In 2016 he finally opened his restaurant in Santa Cristina d’Aspromonte: the Qafiz. The Michelin guide rewards him with a star for the 2019 edition and L’Espresso with three hats in the same year.
Qafiz talks about an unprecedented Calabria, to override the clichés that link it to the imaginary of a land made only of chili peppers and approximate cuisine. A land with such surprising biodiversity needs to get justice even in “higher” areas such as that of fine dining.
This is where Aspromonte comes into play, which acts as a wild setting that Nino loves to show to guests, climbing the roads that emerge into deep gorges for which
the purest springs gush out, among magical herbs with unsettling flavours, where by foraging with an alimurgic expert and his brigade, so much so that it is impossible to avoid the theme of origins. Nino is Ambassador of the Aspromonte Unesco geopark in the world.
The territory as the main prerogative of everything that gravitates around its world, i.e. the Qafiz restaurant and the Cocktail Bar Aspro, through whose products discovered far and wide between Bovesia, Ciminà and all the Grecanic area quickly going up towards the mountain that rejoins Gambarie of which he loves to use the white fir, the porcini mushrooms and the large grazing sheep.
The particularity of the dishes, of the flavours, of the colors let us see that in his cuisine we start from the taste and arrive at the choice of colors and symmetries so that the dish transmits liveliness and functionality in the tasting.
A precise, technical and modern cuisine that pays attention to the raw materials and the processes of contamination of influences from beyond the Alps that the Chef has brought with him since he was a child.
The chef likes to say this: “My project only makes sense here, Aspromonte has become an assist and not an obstacle, it suggests to me through nature how to make the territory and my cuisine evolve.”