Few chefs embody the spirit of their region as deeply as Nino Rossi. Born in Calabria, his culinary journey was shaped not by formal training but by experience, curiosity, and a profound connection to the Aspromonte mountains, where working in his family’s estate inspired a lifelong dedication to cooking.
At Qafiz, Rossi transforms Calabria’s landscapes, traditions, and biodiversity into a contemporary culinary language. Through foraged ingredients, local producers, and refined technique, he reveals the richness of a region often overlooked, creating a cuisine that is both deeply rooted in place and open to constant evolution.
The Best Chef: Qafiz was born on your family estate. How has growing up in this place shaped not only your cuisine but also the person you are today?
Nino Rossi: You don’t grow up in Aspromonte. Aspromonte grows inside you.
As a child, I thought the woods were normal. The silence was normal. Then I started traveling and realized the rest of the world had forgotten how to listen.
Qafiz isn’t built on family land. It’s built on everything that land took from me and everything it gave back.
It taught me patience before ambition. Seasons before trends. Hunger before luxury. People think I’m cooking dishes. I’m just translating the place that raised me with words from a curious traveller.
The Best Chef: Aspromonte is at the heart of everything you do. If someone could taste Calabria in just one bite, what would it be and why?
Nino Rossi: It wouldn’t be sweet. It wouldn’t be comfortable. It would taste like smoke after rain. Wild fennel crushed between your fingers. Bergamot oil on your skin. Salt from two seas meeting against the mountains.
Calabria is contradiction. It’s the poorest table serving the richest ingredients.
One bite should leave you slightly uncomfortable. Because that’s what this land does. It doesn’t seduce you. It survives you.
The Best Chef: Many chefs leave their hometowns to build their careers. You chose to stay and build something extraordinary in Calabria. Why was that important to you?
Nino Rossi: Leaving is easy. Staying is where your ego starts losing. Everyone told me success lived somewhere else. Bigger cities. Bigger airports. Bigger audiences. I wanted to prove something different.
If your ideas are strong enough, people will travel. Not because you’re convenient. Because you must be impossible to replace.
I didn’t stay because Calabria was easy. I stayed because someone had to stop apologizing for it.
The Best Chef: You work with forgotten traditions and wild ingredients. Is there one ingredient from Aspromonte that you believe the world still hasn’t discovered?
Nino Rossi: The ingredient isn’t a mushroom. Or a herb. Aspromonte has hundreds of edible plants that deserve more attention. The mountain feeds those who leave something behind. That’s an ingredient modern gastronomy still struggles to understand.
The Best Chef: If Qafiz disappeared tomorrow, what would you hope people would remember most about the experience?
Nino Rossi: Not the awards. Not a single dish. I hope they’d remember feeling that, for a few hours, the world outside had stopped shouting. That they looked out of a window and understood that luxury isn’t marble or crystal. Luxury is hearing the wind before you hear yourself. If they remember that feeling, Qafiz hasn’t disappeared at all.
The Best Chef: What is one lesson Calabria continues to teach you every day as a chef?
Nino Rossi: That nature doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care about reservations, deadlines or awards. Some years mushrooms don’t come. Some years the rain arrives too late. Some years the best ingredient simply refuses to exist.
Calabria reminds me every morning that I don’t create anything.
I’m only the last person touching something that was already perfect before I arrived.
Chef Instagram: @ninorossichef
Restaurant Instagram: @qafizristorante
Restaurant Address: Loc. Calabretto 1, Santa Cristina, D’ Aspromonte (RC), Italy
