Davide Marzullo

Coming Up

Family restaurants tend to teach the basics early: service pace, room reading, the weight of repetition. Davide Marzullo grew up inside that rhythm, in a family linked to the restaurant business, and the first push toward the kitchen came from his uncle. That background shows in the way he speaks about hospitality now: plain, direct, and built around relationship before display. Since 2021, he has led the kitchen at Trattoria Contemporanea in Lomazzo, Italy, bringing that same steady register to the role. Training at Istituto superiore Giovanni Falcone was followed by a run of kitchens that shaped his method one step at a time. Marzullo worked as chef at Hibiscus, then as chef at The Connaught in London, where pace and precision would have set the terms of the job. He then moved to The Market Place in Como, before becoming chef at Villa Crespi from 2019. Taken together, those rooms map a career built through sequence rather than spectacle.

Where They Are Now

At Trattoria Contemporanea, the work is framed around humility and clarity. Since 2021, Marzullo has been head chef there, and his stated aim is “to give value to humble products and to tell the story of who we are: a group of young people who have been working together for five years, with an average age of around twenty-five.” The point is not ornament. It is to make modest ingredients carry meaning through technique, discipline, and a shared kitchen culture. His idea of territory also stays close to the trade. “The territory is not just the producer. The territory is the people,” Marzullo says, placing human relationships inside the same frame as sourcing and place. That view gives Trattoria Contemporanea its shape in Lomazzo, Italy: a restaurant where the team matters as much as the plate, and where the chef’s job includes holding that structure together.

Signature

Davide’s signature dishes include Istinto, a name that points to instinct and direct expression, and the sort of dish title that does not explain itself away.

In Their Words “We are simple people, and the first thing we look for in a person is the relationship.” “The territory is not just the producer. The territory is the people.”