At Venice’s Hotel Cipriani, Chef Vania Ghedini’s Menu Is a Taste of Italy
When Massimo Bottura first called Vania Ghedini to invite her to become the head chef of Oro, the one Michelin-starred restaurant at Venice’s Belmond Hotel Cipriani, her immediate reaction was a hard “no.” Ghedini had been working at Sesamo in Marrakesh for the past five years and didn’t see herself returning to her home country. She was also nine months pregnant at the time.
“I said, ‘No, you are crazy. It’s not possible,’” Ghedini tells Observer on a September day in Venice, sitting inside Oro. “I said, ‘You want to open the restaurant in April with me, with a baby?’ But then all of my family said I was crazy because I said no to Massimo Bottura. And here we are.”
Ghedini officially joined Oro earlier this year, ahead of the fine dining restaurant’s relaunch as the hotel opened for the season in May, with Bottura as the culinary creative director. She credits the success to her team, who helped make the transition much easier—although it was still a challenge.
“Maybe with a more complicated team, with a less focused sous chef, with more responsibility, I couldn’t have made this work,” she admits. “Having a baby at home, it’s not that simple. I work every night; he wakes up to eat at night, and in the morning, I’m at home with the baby. I think about the restaurant, I think about him. It is difficult to balance the time you need [as a mother] and to open a restaurant with Massimo Bottura.” Somehow, though, Ghedini succeeded in managing it all.
Creating the restaurant’s menu, which includes a five-course tasting option and à la carte dishes, was an interesting process for Ghedini. Because Oro is part of a hotel, she had to take dietary concerns into consideration. Everything on the tasting menu can be easily swapped to be vegetarian or vegan, which was essential for the restaurant’s clientele. Ghedini wanted to make an “intelligent menu,” where anything can be adapted without special ingredients.
“Every single customer has a different allergy, or inquiry, or need,” she explains. “I adapt everything. For example, the aubergine dish is a vegetarian plate with parmesan sauce, aubergine and a cream of aubergine, but if I have a vegan customer, I can make a vegan eggplant with coconut sauce to replace the parmesan sauce. You can customize each dish, especially if it’s vegetarian already.”
Another goal was to showcase local fish and produce, especially ingredients from Venice’s lagoon, which can be seen from the restaurant windows. A standout dish on Oro’s tasting menu this season, “Lagoon,” elevates oysters from a local purveyor, Ostrica del Doge, alongside mussels, caviar, blue crab, bottarga and marinated sea fennel, offering a brine-tinged glimpse of the region.
“I want to help the customer understand the quality products we have in Venice,” Ghedini says. “Fish is maybe the most important product that I use in Oro, because in the Venice lagoon, you find a typology of fish you don’t find in other places, especially in Emilia-Romagna, in Ferrara, where I live. The oyster, for me, is the best oyster in the world. Not [just] in Italy—the world. More than the French oyster. So it’s very important that we use this product and the vegetables from the lagoon. We have an island, Sant’Erasmo, which is known as the vegetable garden of Venice.”
The dishes at Oro, which include Ghedini’s artful, flavor-rich takes on risotto and bigoli pasta, aren’t just about Venice and the surrounding lagoon. She wants guests to better understand Italy through her cooking. The à la carte menu, for instance, includes “Ferrara Pasticcio,” which showcases a layered pasta dish from Ghedini’s hometown.
“You taste Italy,” she says. “You taste the flavors of Italy. If you eat in the north of Italy, it’s not the same plates everywhere. It’s not from the same tradition. On the menu, we have two or three original, very traditional dishes, like [our] ‘Bigoli in Salsa.’ I think that’s the best gift I can give my customers: You come to Oro, but you taste all of Italy. For me, when someone comes to order, it’s like they’re coming to my home. I think of it like when the grandchildren come home, and the grandmother just wants to feed them.”
Bottura, who Ghedini first met at an event in Abu Dhabi, has some sway over the menu, although he doesn’t get overly involved. He tasted all of the dishes as Ghedini was developing them, once at Sesamo and once at Oro as the full experience. But he’s never been forceful with his opinion.
“Massimo is not the kind of chef who is like, ‘I don’t like this, make it like this,’” Ghedini says. “He suggests that you think about the dishes. He doesn’t offer a solution. He asks, ‘How do you make this plate better than this?’ It’s up to you to figure it out. It’s more complicated [that way]. I find myself thinking about it during the day, during the night as I try to answer it. He’s one of the best chefs in the world, like Alain Ducasse, and it’s very important to give him a good answer to his questions.”
The menu, of course, will change for the 2025 season. Hotel Cipriani recently closed its doors for the year and won’t re-open until next May, giving Ghedini plenty of time to develop dishes and research new techniques and ingredients. It’s a process she enjoys, although she’s not sure she wants to give up on any of the signature dishes from her first year at Oro. “I love all of these dishes on this menu. [But] if you tell me I have to keep the menu, I will say, ‘No.’ Maybe I won’t give up the menu, but I’ll add more dishes. Maybe that’s the solution!”
When she’s not at Oro, Ghedini doesn’t tend to cook for herself all that much. Instead, she eats at the restaurant, sometimes testing out new ideas that pop into her head. But she does cook for her husband, who also works at Hotel Cipriani, and their son. Earlier in the day before we spoke, she prepared swordfish with oil, garlic, parsley, lemon and green beans, which she calls “the perfect dinner.”
For Ghedini, finding this balance between career and family is the true measure of success. Although, of course, she’d love to see if she can add a star or two to Oro’s Michelin resume.
“If you’d asked me [about success] earlier in my career, I would have said, ‘I want to be a famous chef,’” Ghedini says. “But during my career, I’ve changed my answer, and since coming to Oro, I’ve changed it again. If it’s possible, I want to get two or three Michelin stars here. Why not? Now I am free to think and [voice my opinion] in the kitchen. I’ve tasted this freedom, and I love it.” It’s refreshing to hear a chef openly share their Michelin ambitions, instead of hiding behind generic comments conveying a practiced nonchalance about awards.
Ultimately, she’s glad she didn’t say no to Bottura. “I think that was normal,” she says of her initial reaction. “I was a chef, but first I was a pregnant woman, and the brain of a pregnant woman is different. I’m not the same person I was two years ago. How could I explain that to Massimo Bottura? But now Oro is open, and it’s done, and I’m glad.”