Meet the Italian “Latex Chef” in a jumpsuit that is redefining gastronomy

Songbirds are the first clue.

Their cries greet guests as they enter the lobby of Aqua Crua, an avant-garde gastronomic entertainment venue in a small town in Italy’s staid Veneto region. They serve as the soundtrack to the entire experience. They signal that chef Giuliano Baldessari’s version of gastronomy is different. It’s not tied to tradition or rules, it’s closely connected to nature, and it’s not afraid to be loud and jarring.

Baldessari is a sensitive being. The birds, especially the small, colorful creatures, are there to make the guests smile, he says, but also because he fears they will be too cold in the mountains. Nature speaks to him a lot.

“I have been hyperactive since childhood,” he says. “I grew up in the forests of Trentino, fishing in streams, building dams and participating in activities that made me happy and tired. I still spend most of my free time in the woods looking for rare herbs, mushrooms, wild fruits or simply hugging trees and enjoying their energy.”

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

Over time, he realized that wearing a black latex suit, sometimes with a mask on his head and gloves on his hands, would comfort him. It’s a way to isolate himself from the discomfort and focus only on the taste, he says; a therapeutic means.

“The time has come to reveal the truth. By daring to expose his madness and revealing his personal struggles, he believes he can draw visitors into an immersive experience.”

It all started when his girlfriend sent him to a supermarket to buy a tomato and he came back empty-handed, overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in the store. One of his friends has a degree in sexual practices, he says, and she told him about a practice that involves blocking your senses to focus on just one.

He tried it in the kitchen and found it “very natural,” he recalls. “A whole world opened up to me. I can’t use my nose, I can’t use my ears. It’s just the flavor.” Soon, it felt like a second skin, and he’s discovered it also helps him stay focused while customers sit across the aisle.

While he embraces the aesthetic novelty of being “the latex chef” (see his Instagram account, for example), he insists that it’s not about attracting attention. He knows that seeing fetish accessories in an open kitchen can be off-putting to some, especially in conservative northern Italy, but he has chosen to reveal his vulnerability.

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

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

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

Even though he considers Aqua Crua his hermitage to recover from life’s traumas, Baldessari remembers that he runs a restaurant. The chef is a die-hard geek about quality ingredients. And he still loves his forests, to the point of hating hydroponics and being skeptical of gardens in general. In a year, he harvests about 500 different ingredients. “I serve wild plants and herbs from the forest because we can smell and hear their flavor,” he says, emphasizing that he used the right verb. “We can listen to their flavor profile and their energy.”

But he also has a farm for other things, like his bees. As he showed his hives to reporters, he said we would eat them later. Knowing that English is not his first language, we assumed he meant we would eat the honey. We were wrong.

The bees were served halfway through our second dinner at Aqua Crua, a mash-up of Menus 2 and 3 for a select few guests. Stripped of their exoskeletons, they arrived as small pieces of flesh arranged on silver spheres the shape and size of dented bowling balls. We looked at them, talked about them—they were male bees, we were told—photographed them, and finally ate them. A waiter later told us we should have eaten them more quickly; they had been served frozen.

The thawed bee bodies weren’t the most unusual thing on this menu. Their exoskeletons showed up later, crispy and fried on a meat platter. I’m being vague because advanced menus also include ingredients that, for various reasons, can’t be described. He says he has certificates for some products that other chefs don’t. He also says he likes forbidden things.

He certainly enjoys provocation. This hybrid dinner began with a salad of bitter herbs soaked in balsamic vinegar under an “edible” plastic wrap that is meant to be a critique of throwaway culture. (Note to chefs everywhere: Edible and enjoyable are two different things.) It ended with “the idea of ​​strudel,” a dessert made from year-old apples.

In the meantime, he challenged rebellious ideas. Moldy meat contaminated with Penicillium candidum and aged for two months (“born out of a desire to break my own rules”) had a white, fuzzy coating that looked like an unraveled cotton ball. Seared local squid was served with cordyceps, which the waiter explained was a fungus that grows on the backs of spiders, “like a zombie mushroom.” I wondered if he had seen The last of us.

A clearer cinematic reference appeared in the form of a mass of black filaments on a plate: corn silk seasoned with squid ink and brewer’s yeast. The waiter winked and said it was an homage to the director Tinto Brass. (The reference is obscure, but one can guess the subject matter of the 1980s Italian auteurs.)

Later, the ginger risotto with Mexican marigold leaves and orange brought me some relief: a relatively traditional dish, which showed off a well-honed technique beneath the theatrics. I enjoyed it until I thought I was seeing the unthinkable and noticed my companions picking at their food with equal concern. The real relief came when we understood the joke: fine black “hairs” had been painted on the plates.

It’s perhaps the dish that best represents the place. Baldessari marches to his own beat. His conversations range from hunting and butchering whole animals to energy fields, reincarnation and the ghost that haunts one of the guest rooms upstairs. But the common thread through it all, he says, is that he wants to provoke the spirits.

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