Chef · Lisbon
Michelin technique,simple enough to cook at home.
Chef Hack
The story
Geranium, Copenhagen
I was cooking in a hotel on a small island in the Bahamas, and I was tired. So I wrote to the fifty best restaurants in the world. Ten of them answered. One took me to Copenhagen, to Geranium, the year it was named the best restaurant on earth.
What I learned there wasn't technique. It was honesty. You find the best ingredient you can and you let it speak, with nothing to hide behind. Every dish belongs to its place and its season.
I'm not in Copenhagen now. I'm in Lisbon, and I've spent the last years proving that the same idea travels — that it works just as well with Portuguese fish and an Italian hand.
The kitchens
Twenty years in the kitchen, in Italy and around the world. Not all of them had stars — and some of the most useful things I know came out of rooms nobody writes about.
Now
Same technique, same obsession with the ingredient — taken apart until it fits a normal kitchen, a normal oven and one pan.
The problem in a home kitchen was never talent. It's that nobody ever explained the why. Why the pan has to be that hot. Why the fish comes out underdone. Why the sauce splits at the last second and what to do in the ten seconds you have left.
All of it goes out under one name — Chef Hack. A recipe a week, filmed in my own kitchen, each one built on something I learned in a professional one and then stripped of everything a home cook doesn't have.
Every one cooked in my own kitchen before it goes up, with the failures written in. Metric and US measures, pan-size conversions, and the shortcut alongside the long way.
Open the recipesThe whole Christmas table, written so everything lands hot at the same moment. Traditions mix on the table, not in the pan. The countdown — the timing plan — is free to read now.
Read the countdown chapterOne-to-one lessons over video, in your own kitchen, with your own pans. We cook together and I correct as you go — sauces, meat, fish, pastry, or whatever keeps going wrong.
The letter
What I cooked, where it broke, and what I'd do differently. No recipe dumps. Reply and tell me what goes wrong in your kitchen — not the dish, the moment — and I usually write back.
Work with me
I work with a small number of food, equipment and ingredient brands each year — the ones I'd have in my own kitchen anyway. Recipe development, filmed technique, product work, and menu consulting for restaurants.
If that sounds like you, write to me directly.
mattia@mattiastanchieri.com