The new Michelin-starred Sedicesimo Secolo tells his Master: “He was a normal person, always present, elegant even when he got angry”
On April 8th, the Sedicesimo Secolo will turn three and will celebrate with its first Michelin star. Among the new “deviations” of 2019, Simone Breda’s Lombard restaurant has proven to be mature and ready to do better than yesterday.
He was twenty-three years old when he changed his perspective and entered the Albereta Relais & Chateau as an intern: “I already felt old. I didn’t do gastronomic cooking yet and I wanted to try something different “. Before his internship ended, he was hired and this collaboration lasted three years, during which he learned really very much from the great Gualtiero Marchesi. “He was the biggest school of Italian cuisine”. To quote Einstein: “I have no particular talents. I’m just passionately curious”. And it was so for the Master too, who not only continuously asked questions, but also managed to train an entire generation of chefs, from Berton to Cracco, from Oldani to Lo Priore, from Knam to Crippa, bringing out the best in everyone. “He didn’t prepare food with us, but he could suddenly take the knife from our hands.” L’Albereta was not just a restaurant but also a furnace of new talent, and here the chef from Brescia was forged on a technical level with a very strong classical base. The Michelin-starred disciple remembers Marchesi as a posed and elegant man, even in the fieriest moments “And if something bothered him, he never lost control”. He always wanted to be called cook and not chef, because he was interested in the vision of the dish, the approach shown in doing so. For Simone Breda, Marchesi is in every recipe: “I learned from him the great respect for the raw material and how to enhance it, without covering it”.
Simone Breda, born in 1985, after several international experiences, has returned home, in the countryside of the lower Brescia area. “A restaurant of our own”: together with his lifelong partner, Eliana Genini, Simone set out on his own by moving from employee to entrepreneur of himself. The cuisine of Sedicesimo Secolo is a hymn to his roots, celebrating the territory to assemble and offer customers something different. “I like to melt sea and earth, like my cuttlefish roasted with mushrooms and backyard hen broth“. Yet, when asked what his signature dish is, he replies: “It is impossible to have the same plate on the menu all year long”. The young student of Marchesi hasn’t found his Risotto Oro e Zafferano yet, the signature dish of the initiator of Italian nouvelle cuisine. However, Gualtiero Marchesi was about fifty years old when he created his Risotto. Simone Breda is only thirty-four.
