Meet Italy’s Catsuit-Clad “Latex Chef” Who Is Redefining Fine Dining

The songbirds are the first clue.

Their calls greet guests as they enter the vestibule of Aqua Crua, a funhouse of avant-garde gastronomy in a small town in Italy’s staid Veneto region. They serve as the soundtrack for the whole experience. They signal that chef Giuliano Baldessari’s version of fine dining is different. It’s not bound by traditions or rules, it’s closely connected to nature, and it’s not afraid to be screechy and discordant.

Baldessari is a sensitive soul. The birds—mostly colorful little things—are there to bring smiles to arriving diners’ faces, he says, but also because he worried they would be too cold in the mountains. Nature strikes a strong chord with him.

“Since I was a child, I have been hyperactive,” he says, “growing up in the forests of Trentino and fishing in streams, building dams and engaging in activities that made me happy and tired. I still spend most of my free time in the woods searching for rare herbs, mushrooms, wild fruits, or simply embracing trees and enjoying their energy.”

Those idyllic moments were bright spots in a chaotic childhood. A troubled adolescence gave way to salvation in the kitchen. He opened Aqua Crua in 2014 and was rewarded with a Michelin star within a year. The accolades have continued, including from the influential Italian food critic Andrea Petrini, but Baldessari is still healing.

Along the way, he figured out that wearing a black latex catsuit, sometimes with a mask over his head and gloves on his hands, would comfort him. It’s a way to isolate himself from discomfort and focus solely on taste, he says; a therapeutic medium.

“The time has come to unveil the truth. By daring to expose his madness and unveiling his personal struggles, he believes he can lead guests into an immersive experience.”

It began when his girlfriend sent him to a supermarket to buy a tomato and he returned empty-handed, overwhelmed by the number of things in the store. One of her friends has a degree in sexual practices, he says, and she told him about a practice where you block your senses in order to focus on just one.

He tried it in the kitchen and found it felt “very natural,” he recalls. “A whole world opened to me. I can’t use my nose; I can’t use my ears. There’s just flavor.” Soon it felt like a second skin, and he found that it also helps him keep his concentration while clients sit on the other side of the pass.

Although he leans into the aesthetic novelty of being “the latex chef”—see his Instagram, for instance—he insists it’s not for attention. He knows that seeing fetish gear in an open kitchen is off-putting to some, especially in conservative northern Italy, but he’s made a choice to reveal his vulnerability.

“The time has come to unveil the truth,” reads a dossier sent to journalists. “By daring to expose his madness and unveiling his personal struggles, he believes he can lead guests into an immersive experience where actor, director and setting converge into a singular entity.”

This immersive experience is theatrical in the extreme. While there’s still a classic à la carte menu focused on tradition and technique, the reason to travel to Aqua Crua is its three transgressive (his word) tasting menus. Baldessari insists that every guest begins with menu 1; only after an “initiation” dinner does menu 2 become available.

Menu 3 requires even more dedication to the place. The restaurant’s marketing materials call it “a pinnacle of provocation, a surreal experience where barriers fall, senses shift dimensions and extreme discomfort transforms into a powerful, shared encounter.”

Even as he considers Aqua Crua his hermitage to heal from life’s traumas, Baldessari remembers that he’s running a restaurant. The chef is unapologetically geeky about quality ingredients. And he still loves his forests—to the point that he hates hydroponics and is skeptical about gardens in general. In a year, drilling about 500 different ingredients. “I serve wild plants and herbs from the forest because we can feel and hear their flavor,” he says, insisting that he’s used the correct verb. “We can listen to their flavor profile and energy.”

But he also keeps a farm for a few other things, such as his bees. Showing journalists around his hives, he said we would be eating them later. Understanding that English is not his first language, we assumed he meant we would be eating the honey. We were wrong.

The bees were served around the halfway point of our second dinner at Aqua Crua, a hybrid of menus 2 and 3 for a few selected guests. Removed from their exoskeletons, they arrived as little slivers of flesh arranged atop silver spheres the shape and size of toothed bowling balls. We looked at them, talked about them—they were male bees, we were told—photographed them and eventually ate them. Afterward, a waiter told us we should have eaten them more quickly; they’d been served frozen.

The defrosted bee bodies were not the most unusual thing on that menu. Their exoskeletons turned up later, crisp-fried atop a meat dish. I’m being vague because the advanced menus also include ingredients that, for various reasons, cannot be written about. He says he holds certificates for certain products that other chefs do not. He also says he likes forbidden things.

He certainly likes provocation. That hybrid dinner began with a salad of balsamic-slaked bitter herbs under a film of “edible” plastic that’s meant to be a criticism of disposable culture. (Note to chefs everywhere: Edible and enjoyable are different things.) It ended with “the idea of ​​strudel,” a dessert made with year-old apples.

In between, he threw down a gauntlet of rebellious ideas. Moldy meat contaminated with Penicillium candidum and aged for two months (“born from a desire to break my own rules”) had a fluffy white coating that looked like an unraveled cotton ball. Seared local squid was served with cordyceps, which the waiter explained as a fungus that grows on the back of spiders, “like a zombie mushroom.” I wondered if he’d seen The Last of Us.

A clearer film reference arrived as a pile of black filaments on a plate: corn silk seasoned with cuttlefish ink and brewer’s yeast. The waiter won as he said it was an homage to the director Tinto Brass. (The reference is obscure, but one can guess the preferred subject matter of 1980s Italian authors.)

Later, risotto with ginger, Mexican marigold leaves and orange came as something of a relief: a reasonably traditional dish, one that showed the well-honed technique underneath the theatrics. I enjoyed it until I thought I saw the unthinkable and noticed my companions poking their food with the same concern. The real relief came when we got the joke: that fine black “hairs” had been painted onto the plates.

Maybe that’s the dish that best represents the place. Baldessari marches to his own drummer. His conversations range from hunting and whole-animal butchery to energy fields, reincarnation and the ghost that haunts one of the guest rooms upstairs. But the thread that runs through it all, he says, is that he wants to provoke minds.

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