Treasure Your Mistakes: What Chef Michele Casadei Massari Learns Every Spring
Warmer season and new ideas arrive at Lucciola NYC.
The first delivery of young peas comes in, a lighter color of a bunch of asparagus, natural light coming through the front door: at Lucciola NYC, Spring means seasonal details on the menu and new energy. It is a reset, a moment to look at what the season is offering and ask, with fresh eyes, what we can do better this year than we did last year.
That question, for a chef, is not purely about ingredients. It is, in some way, about mistakes.
The Dish That Didn't Work
People often ask Chef Michele Casadei Massari where to eat well. Then, after answering, he has always the same thought. He knows the people in front of him through their dishes. It is not a matter of judging them. As the person who was once standing in front of that same problem, in a kitchen, trying to understand what went wrong, Chef Michele knows their thoughts, like a mentalist:
“I recognize a technical mistake in a dish not because I am the most skilled person in the room. I recognize it because I have made that exact mistake myself, so many times. Pasta slightly past the point. A sauce that loses structure halfway through service. A cooking technique that doesn't fully protect the ingredient it was meant to elevate.”
Spring, more than any other season, demands this kind of honesty from a chef. The ingredients are delicate, “young” vegetables have no fat, no depth, no structure to hide behind, there is nowhere to compensate. If the technique is off — even slightly — the ingredient tells you immediately.
At Lucciola NYC, our seasonal Italian tasting menu is built on exactly this discipline: ingredients chosen at their peak, techniques refined through repetition and failure, nothing on the plate that isn't there for a reason.
“Every chef accumulates a very precise memory of their mistakes. It is almost physical. You remember the wrong texture. You remember the aroma that didn't work the way it should have. You remember the exact moment — mid-service, mid-tasting — when you realize something is not right.
That memory becomes knowledge.”
How I Choose a Restaurant — Three Honest Criteria
Everyone asks the chef where to eat, as we said, so it is only right to ask him… How do you choose a restaurant when you are not working? “The same lens I apply to my own kitchen is the one I use when I eat elsewhere. Three parameters, always the same”.
First, ingredients. From a menu, you can often read the origin and quality of what a kitchen is working with: seasonal sourcing and regional specificity.
Second, technical execution: “I look at the texture of meat, the density of sauces, the precision of cooking. These things tell a story that words on a menu cannot.”
Third, value. Always look out for the relationship between what is served and what is asked in return. This is where a restaurant reveals its real character.
And there is one more truth, known well by anyone who has worked in professional kitchens: no restaurant stays perfect forever. A great kitchen can become mediocre in weeks. A mediocre one can become extraordinary just as quickly. A kitchen is a living organism.
Experience Spring at Lucciola NYC
This season, enjoy Italian fine dining in New York: the wine list was recently awarded the Villa Sandi Contemporary Wine List award and we are now part of one of the top-rated Italian restaurants in NYC by Gambero Rosso.
