Okay, so if you walk into Le Calandre in Sarmeola di Rubano, which is just a small town outside Padua, you will see that at this restaurant there are no classic white tablecloths. Instead, there is raw wood and very soothing warm light.
This was a very deliberate choice by Massimiliano Alajmo. He runs the kitchen at Le Calandre, the restaurant his parents opened in 1981. In 2002, at just 28 years old, he became the youngest chef in history to win three Michelin stars. And more than two decades later, he still holds all three.
And there’s this line he once told Reporter Gourmet (Mind you, that’s an important line because it tells you the very philosophy the restaurant follows, and what this feature discusses in detail): “The customer is not a consumer. He must be put at the center of the restaurant.”
A Family Table That Won Three Stars
Massimiliano was born on November 3, 1974, in Padua, to a mother [Rita Chimetto] who was one of the first women in Italy to earn a Michelin star, and a father [Erminio] who ran the restaurant’s FOH. Massimiliano grew up watching them both working.
Later, he trained at the Pietro d’Abano hotel school, then went to France to work under Michel Guérard, the father of nouvelle cuisine. Then he came home.
In 1994, at just 20 years old, Massimiliano took over the kitchen at Le Calandre. His brother Raffaele took the dining room. Here is a kind of timeline that I have put together so that you can understand how the story unfolded from there.
| Year | What Happened |
| 1981 | Erminio and Rita open Le Calandre in Sarmeola di Rubano |
| 1994 | Massimiliano becomes head chef at just 20 years old |
| 1996 | Le Calandre earns its first Michelin star |
| 1997 | The restaurant earns a second star |
| 2002 | Le Calandre wins a third star. Massimiliano, 28, becomes the youngest three-star chef ever |
| 2005 | The restaurant’s most famous (widely talked about throughout the world) dish came to be a saffron risotto with licorice powder |
| 2010 | The dining room is redone. White tablecloths are replaced with raw wood tables |
| 2018 | AMO opens in Venice, a more casual sibling restaurant |
| 2023 | The group opens Sesamo at the Joali resort in the Maldives |
| 2024–2026 | Le Calandre keeps its three stars, year after year |
Yes, holding onto three stars for twenty-four years straight is rare. Most restaurants at that level change hands, change chefs, or simply lose their spark. Le Calandre has done none of that. And Massimiliano says the record itself was never really the point. “I still remember the next day,” he said, “I wanted to change everything, every detail of our kitchen. In short, we experienced it as a stimulus to improve.”
Why Guests Always Come First at Le Calandre
Most fine dining restaurants today hand you one fixed menu and expect you to follow along. Massimiliano thinks, “Food passes through you so it must also represent an element of choice.”
At Le Calandre, you always get three tasting menus, and you can mix and match dishes across them however you like.
He calls this tailoring – just like a suit that’s built for one body may or may not fit the other person, obviously a menu built for one guest should not be forced upon everyone else too.
“You cannot imagine that in our premises all the customers sitting at that moment want the same things,” he explained. Sometimes, even if a guest wants something that is not even on the menu, his kitchen makes it. That is what he means by putting the guest at the center.
As for the staff at Le Calandre, they no longer wear ties. “We did many studies to put the guest at ease, and all this is sensory work.” Similarly, the lighting and the sound in the room are chosen with utmost care, because Massimiliano believes every sense plays a part in how a dish tastes. A warmer light, he says, can make food taste sweeter. A harsh sound can make it taste more sour.
In the kitchen as well, for example, while developing a dish for Identità Golose, his team built a pasta filled with crushed eggshell for crunch. But something bothered him about the sound it made while chewing. So he covered his ears and tried the dish again, and asked his cooks to do the same. “They were all quite shocked,” he said. What he discovered was that crunch is not really about touch at all. It is mostly about the sound your jaw makes as you bite down.
A few more dishes were made with such a level of detail. You can have their Saffron risotto with licorice powder, Cuttlefish cappuccino with ink, Almond mozzarella, Suono N’uovo (Sound of the Egg), or anything else, and you’re bound to fall in love for life with at least one of the dishes.
“We have always made a place as we would have liked to find it,” Massimiliano said, “a bit the representation of our desire.” When you sit down at Le Calandre, in his words, you should feel like you are somehow home. Your heart rate slows. Your shoulders drop. And only then, he believes, can you truly taste what is in front of you.
Now, about his dream…
Massimiliano says he wants to eat at Asador Etxebarri, one of Spain’s most famous restaurants known for open-flame cooking. Simple, and kind of innocent dream, isn’t it?
But that’s what makes Massimiliano him. He is the same man who spent thirty years figuring out (and nailing) how to make guests feel more at home, more welcome, because he wants to be and knows what it is like to be a guest in the first place.
