Dalle Cucine
The people at the pass.
Three kitchens, three standards, one pantry. The chefs who cook with Oro Lusso, in their own words.
Executive Chef · Osteria del Ponte · Mumbai
Matteo Ferrante
Matteo grew up above his family’s trattoria outside Bergamo, where risotto was not a dish but a discipline — stirred by whoever was tallest that year. He trained in Milan and Modena before an offer from a Mumbai hotel group brought him east a decade ago.
In India he found extraordinary cooks and an impossible pantry. “I spent my first two years translating dishes around missing ingredients,” he says. “The day the right rice, the right tomato, the right oil became reliable here, my menu stopped being an approximation.”
At Osteria del Ponte his risotto alla Milanese is finished tableside, mantecatura performed like a small ceremony — butter, Grana, a violent shake of the pan, and ninety seconds of silence.
“A risotto can only be as honest as its rice. With Oro Lusso Arborio I stopped compensating and started cooking.”
- Signature Dish
- Risotto alla Milanese, finished tableside
Chef & Founder · Cascina · New Delhi
Aarav Malhotra
Aarav left a consulting career at twenty-six to apprentice in a two-Michelin-star kitchen in Piedmont, where he spent four years learning what he calls “the arithmetic of restraint” — fewer ingredients, held to a higher standard.
Cascina, his thirty-two-seat room in Delhi’s Mehrauli, serves a weekly-changing Northern Italian menu built almost entirely on imported staples and local produce. “The vegetables here are magnificent. What I could not find was the pantry — the oil, the rice, the flour that behave the same way every single time.”
He was among the first chefs in India to put Oro Lusso Arborio on a printed menu, listed by name — the way wine lists credit a grower.
“Indian diners have the most educated palates I have cooked for. They know when a tomato is telling the truth.”
- Signature Dish
- Acquerello of seasonal vegetables, carnaroli-style risotto
Culinary Director · Grand Palazzo Hotels · Bengaluru & Goa
Lucia Baresi
Lucia has run Italian programmes in Dubai, Singapore and now India, overseeing four fine-dining rooms and a small army of banquet kitchens for the Grand Palazzo group.
Her sourcing philosophy is unsentimental: every SKU must survive a blind tasting against what her mother would buy in Verona. “Most importers send me what sells. Oro Lusso sent me what they would eat. That difference is everything.”
Under her direction the group’s risotto and fresh-pasta programmes standardised on a single rice and a single flour across all properties — a decision she calls “the least glamorous, most important thing I have done here.”
“Consistency is the only luxury a hotel kitchen cannot fake. Sourcing is where it is won or lost.”
- Signature Dish
- Tortelli di zucca with brown butter and amaretti
Per i Professionisti
Cook with us.
We work directly with restaurants, hotels and culinary teams across India — trade pricing, consistent supply, and a pantry chosen the way a chef would choose it.