Luigi Coppola

The Recognition At Casa Coloni in Paestum, Italy, Coppola’s cooking combined constant research into ancient tradition with contemporary cuisine whose essence was elegant and immediately simple. The restaurant is the gourmet restaurant of Tenuta Duca Marigliano, and from 2016 to 2026 he served there as executive chef. His work at the Paestum restaurant tells the Mediterranean territory between land and sea, with dishes created to make the most of local raw materials. The proposal is authentic, values products, respects seasonality, and listens to nature and what it offers, including citrus, organic vegetables, and garden produce from the estate.

The Work

Behind It One of Coppola’s defining specialties is the in-house leavened program: bread, fried pizza, brioche, cakes, and small pastries made with sourdough obtained by fermenting skins from the estate orchard. As he puts it, "We pay a lot of attention to the leavened products that accompany our guests from breakfast to dinner. Each product is made with sourdough, obtained by fermenting the skins of our orchard." That same attention to transformation appears in Mozzarella maturata 365 giorni, introduced by Coppola at Casa Coloni in the homeland of buffalo mozzarella. The dish was conceived to show that excellence can also come through fermentations and oxidations capable of developing organoleptic complexity. Scarpariello is his signature pasta dish: rich with tomatoes and cheese, it pays tribute to his father’s shoemaker trade and draws on the cultural heritage of Naples’ Spanish Quarter. The connection is personal as well as culinary; Coppola is the first generation in his family to pursue cooking, with a homemaker mother and a shoemaker father. His stated philosophy at the restaurant rests on constant research into products, raw materials, and above all technique, with the aim of making guests feel good at his table. The result is modern, avant-garde cuisine capable of telling the territory in an original way.

The Road Coppola’s professional discipline sharpened in Rome. From 2003 to 2005, he worked in the kitchens of Crowne Plaza St Peeter’s, where he significantly deepened his knowledge and understood the importance of rigor and precision within a work team. From 2005 to 2007, he worked at the restaurant of Grand Hotel della Minerva in Rome with chef Fabio Vitale. He later became chef of Divina Commedia, a small restaurant in the province of Salerno, where he experimented and defined his idea of cooking, remaining there until 2015. The move to Paestum gave that idea a precise landscape: estate produce, buffalo mozzarella country, citrus, vegetables, garden harvests, and a coastline culture read through land and sea. At Casa Coloni Ristorante, the title Chef de Cuisine gathers those influences into a kitchen built on technique, seasonality, and local materials.