Chef Profile: A Voce Madison's Davide Venturini

A Voce Madison, known for serving the type of simple and classic Italian dishes New Yorkers flock to, appointed Davide Venturini as their new executive chef in June 2015; he took the reins from chef Ben Lee.

After growing up on the Italian countryside, Venturini began his culinary career in 2008 at London's Michelin-starred Assaggi, where he cooked for notable guests like Bill Gates and Madonna. He then went on to manage several restaurants at the London-based hospitality group Mitchell and Butlers before, in 2011, joining MARC Restaurants' private members' club Morton's in London, eventually serving as MARC chairman Marlon Abela's personal chef.

Chef Venturini often dreamed of working in New York City, drawn to the challenge of cooking for a fast-paced, high-volume restaurant while upholding high standards of quality and consistency. Though he loves the diversity of Tuscan cuisine, with its varied meat, seafood, and mushrooms, his cooking is largely influenced by the regional style of Lombardy. Venturini especially enjoys working with pasta, polenta, and one of his favorite dishes, buckwheat pizzoccheri — a flat, ribbon-like pasta that's 80 percent buckwheat flour and 20 percent wheat flour.

Excited to be leading a kitchen for the first time, Venturini will work to translate home-style Italian cooking to a fine-dining atmosphere, and he told The Daily Meal that he looks forward to sharing his Italian specialties, such as cacio e pepe and lobster scialatielli, with guests at A Voce Madison.