GUCCI OSTERIA RESTAURANT IN FLORENCE
Florence welcomes a new culinary experience as Gucci opens its first restaurant.
January 12, 2018
In keeping with the spirit of creative collaboration that Gucci Garden embraces, chef Massimo Bottura has been invited to open an intimate restaurant on the ground floor, the Gucci Osteria. Bottura is internationally famed for his three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana, which sits just over the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, in the heart of Modena. For Gucci Garden, he has created an entirely new menu that takes influences from his travels and applies these to Italian cuisine. ‘Travelling the world, our kitchen interacts with everything we see, hear and taste,’ says Bottura. ‘With eyes wide open, we look for the unexpected and next éclat.’ The menu will include iconic Italian dishes as well as conceptual twists on classics for an all-day dining experience.
‘The restaurant is a reminder that Florence has always been a centre of cultural exchange, particularly during the Renaissance,’ says Bottura. To reinforce this idea, lines of a 15th-century carnival song (canto carnascialesco) by Lorenzo de’ Medici – Canzona of the seven planets, or Canzona de’ sette pianeti – are written in gold letters around the tops of the walls of the Gucci Osteria.
The ground floor of Gucci Garden is given over to the restaurant and a bazaar-like retail space organised across two large rooms. Here products exclusively designed for the Gucci Garden and not on sale in any other Gucci stores are available. These include shoes and bags in special materials, brocade skirts and coats, and several one-of-a-kind creations, such as silk bomber jackets that feature the Gucci Garden Gothic script. We see the emergence of a dedicated Gucci Garden logo and new symbols entering the lexicon of the House’s motifs, such as a bat, which appears on leather goods and custom jewellery, and a new eye design that decorates small leather goods and gifts.
