SIMONE ZANONI: THE FARM IN A MICHELIN-STAR DISH

Originally from Salò (BS) and forever tied to his roots, our ambassador, Chef Simone Zanoni, is a fountain of ideas, initiatives, and creativity. His passion for cooking was inspired in his earliest childhood, during time spent with his grandmother on the farm, where he learnt the importance of authentic and wholesome ingredients.

After completing his studies, he left for the United Kingdom to refine his culinary skills. From 1997 to 2001, he was a chef at Aubergine restaurant in London, and through his talent, he managed to carve out an indispensable role in the team.

The chef divides his time between two different ventures: Le George restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris, where he earned his first Michelin star in 2017, and his family-oriented project, Casa Zanoni, the online platform he created during the pandemic to bring the restaurant experience to people worldwide during the lockdown.

For Chef Zanoni, cuisine is a journey into flavours, discoveries, and pleasures that requires one essential ingredient: passion. He combines this with his main objective: to offer healthy, shareable dishes based on principles of sustainability and ethics, achieved by implementing sustainable practices as a core value in the kitchen.

It is no coincidence that Le George was the first hotel restaurant in Paris to eliminate bottled water, replacing it with filtered water, and one of the first to start recycling food waste in collaboration with Les Alchimistes – CirculAgronomie, a Paris company that handles the recovery of organic waste. Even the coffee waste is recycled through a partnership with the French company La Boîte à Champignons, which uses it to cultivate field mushrooms, later served as an ingredient in one of the dishes at Le George.

At the end of your meal at Le George, you can enjoy Kafa Forest coffee, with aromatic notes of dates, cherries, and honey. Derived from the first coffee plants and with an intense and lingering flavour, Kafa Forest is currently ranked among the world’s finest coffees, and grows in the eponymous Ethiopian forest. It is hand-harvested and left to dry naturally.