New chef on the block

When chef Gabriele Feliciani walks into his mother's kitchen, she shoos him away.

"You would need 10 people following you for you to boss around," she teases, before cooking for him as she always has at the family farm, surrounded by olive groves in Abruzza, on Italy's east coast.

Feliciani has earned three coveted Michelin stars from stints in Germany and Italy, and opened his namesake restaurant, Gabriele Ristorante, in Prague in late September. But despite his star quality, a return to the basics of Italian cuisine in a family-style atmosphere are the main concepts behind his Old Town eatery, which takes up the stone-cellar space previously occupied by Flambee.

In person, Feliciani is exuberant and brims with Mediterranean warmth. His boyish face, with round, twinkling eyes and an impish grin, shows little sign of what can be a harrowing - and hardening - business.

Feliciani has worked at award-winning restaurants in New York, Miami, Boston, Berlin, Barcelona, Florence and elsewhere. Many were focused on haute French cuisine, which Feliciani studied to a great appreciation. After several decades in the kitchen, however, he came to the realization that it wasn't for him, both in the rigidity of the cuisine and the formality of the experience.

"I wanted to bring Italian culture and atmosphere into a restaurant of my own," he says, sipping on a glass of Prosecco in Gabriele Ristorante recently. "In the French places where I used to work, there was too much tension, too much formality. I was under too much pressure, and the customers noticed."

His standards for Gabriele are 100 percent upscale fine-dining, but the feel is relaxed. People dressed in jeans chatter over candlelight and Italian music, families with children often pack the place out on Sunday afternoons, and the décor, while grand, is subtle and intimate in the arched rooms. Cream-colored tablecloths and comfortable chairs draped in wine red set off the black marble floors, and gold sconces give off a warming glow against the exposed stone walls.

"Even though I want to lead a five-star restaurant, I want people to feel at home here, and not like they can't do anything. I dislike it when restaurants are so formal and silent that you feel you must whisper and watch your manners," Feliciani says.

"Most upscale French restaurants are like that," he continues, adding that it distracts from what really matters in any restaurant: the food.

"Italian cuisine has good basics, and I want to offer the Italian tradition of cooking," he says. "The technique and vocabulary of international gastronomy may be French, but the substance and the taste and everything are Italian. The goal should not be elaborateness, but simplicity."

The menu at Gabriele Ristorante is competitively priced in relation to other upscale restaurants. Feliciani says one can "come and spend 5 euros on a dish, or 50." The descriptions of the items on the menu are refreshingly unpretentious, such as "ravioli stuffed with liquid carbonara" (295 Kč), "lamb saddle stuffed with goat cheese, spinach and pine nuts" (595 Kč) and "tagliatelle with ox-tail ragout" (325 Kč).

The restaurant imports 80 percent of its ingredients from Italy, including olives and olive oil from Feliciani's family groves. Fish is shipped directly from Sicily via Venice and travels from sea to plate in five days, maximum.

Feliciani describes conceptualizing his menu as wanting people to be able to taste things the way he does, to precisely convey to a customer exactly the impression he, as not only the chef but also a food lover, has of a particular combination of flavors. And he confidently plays around with unconventional pairings. One of the desserts, for example, is homemade cinnamon ice cream, served with shavings of Parmesan and 30-year-old balsamic vinegar (225 Kč).

The team behind the kitchen doors mostly comprises Italians, young ambitious cooks who have come here specifically to work under Feliciani. In the future, he hopes to hire a few more Czechs to "better understand the local mentality."

In his various stints worldwide, Feliciani has cooked for the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi and Boris Becker. Having finally realized his dream of opening his own restaurant in Prague - he has long been entranced by the beauty and history of the city - he's not star-struck, despite having already tasted the success of Michelin recognition.

"It doesn't matter if you're dealing with five stars or zero," he says. "You have to do your best, and you always have to offer the customer something new."

Judging from the solid booking for most of December and some reservations already slated for next June and July, Prague better get ready to accept a new star on the fine-dining scene.

- Jitka Massolini Horčičková contributed to this report.

Fiona Gaze can be reached at
fgaze@praguepost.com