Alberto Navari

The Climb

Today, Alberto Navari is Executive Chef of Zeb. The role fits a cooking style that depends on judgment at speed: reading what is freshest, deciding what deserves a place on the board, and building from there.

Today

At Zeb, the work is home cooking and seasonal cuisine. The point is clarity: food that reads as familiar without flattening into routine, and restraint that lets the market set the terms. The menu’s shape comes from what is available, not from a fixed plan imposed on it.

Signature

Alberto's signature dishes include zuppa e bollito. It sits squarely within his method: grounded, direct, and attentive to what is available. In Navari’s kitchen, a signature is less a fixed plate than a readable way of cooking, one that stays recognizable through seasonality and consistency.

In Their Words “My menu is always changing. My butcher might bring me a particularly nice piece of girello roast or a brace of rabbits and that’s what I’ll cook. It’s the reason I write my menu on a blackboard. So that I can add new dishes every day.” The blackboard makes the kitchen’s working method visible. The menu stays open to the butcher’s delivery and to what looks worth cooking that day, so the list remains a record of decisions made in real time rather than a closed statement. The name shows the same habit of working from what is immediately in front of him: a pattern on the counters, a concept around zuppa e bollito, and a choice that settled into place. It is a small example of how the restaurant’s identity was built through observation and adjustment.

Recognition

The clearest mark of his work is the discipline of cooking from the market and the butcher rather than from a fixed script. That approach gives the kitchen its coherence: a menu that changes every day, a style anchored in seasonality, and the steady confidence of a chef who lets the ingredients lead.