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Victoria Burrows

Italian chef Giuliano Baldessari likes to wear a rubber fetish suit in the kitchen. The skin-tight shiny black latex covers him from head to fingers to feet, leaving only his eyes and mouth exposed.
He does not wear the rubber for kicks. It is, for him, a sort of therapy.
Since childhood, Baldessari, now 47, has struggled with hyperactivity. A difficult upbringing only exacerbated his inability to process complex emotions and focus on tasks in front of him.
When a girlfriend mentioned a technique described in her friend’s university course on sexual deviance, it struck a chord. She explained how BDSM practitioners block certain forms of sensory information to heighten others.

He decided to try it, hoping it would help him focus. When he pulled on a latex suit for the first time, it felt entirely natural, he says.
“I can’t really hear anything, can’t smell anything and when I’m wearing the gloves, my sense of touch is minimised. I can focus entirely on flavour.”
He has worn a catsuit in the kitchen for about a decade, but only went public with his proclivity a few years ago when he built up the courage to share his vulnerabilities with the world, he says.
Since then, guests can see the “latex chef” cooking in his catsuit in the open kitchen of his restaurant, Aqua Crua, in Barbarano Vicentino, about an hour’s drive from Venice.
He is an incongruous sight in a kitchen in conservative northern Italy, a lithe figure in black tending to his pans among the white toques of his cooks.

But there is much that is seductively incongruous about Aqua Crua. Baldessari opened the restaurant in 2013 and within a year it had earned a Michelin star, which it still has.
With his culinary background, the plaudit came as no surprise: he had worked at Milan’s modern Italian stalwart, Il Luogo Aimo e Nadia, plus the lauded hotel Villa D’Este on the banks of Lake Como, where Madonna professed her love for his tagliolini al pomodoro.
He also spent two seasons with Marc Veyrat, the legendary French proponent of molecular gastronomy, whose restaurants at one point held nine Michelin stars.
It was during his time at Veyrat’s restaurants in France that he met Italian chef Massimiliano Alajmo, executive chef of Le Calandre in Padua, Italy. In 2002, Le Calandre picked up three Michelin stars, making Alajmo, who was 28 at the time, the youngest chef in history to earn his kitchen the guide’s highest recognition.
Alajmo brought Baldessari back to Italy in 2003 as his sous chef, where he stayed for a decade.

With a CV like this – and one taste of his exceptional handmade pasta – there is no doubt that Baldessari can cook. But what he is doing at Aqua Crua is far beyond a delicious meal.
His short à la carte menu offers elevated, contemporary takes on Italian classics, such as an elegant saffron risotto; local scallops served with Italian-style spinach; and a take on strudel with sour vanilla ice cream, burnt wheat powder, raisins and cinnamon-flavoured apple.
But his three set menus, each one taking a step up in extremity, are where he digs deep into his creativity, experimenting with just how far he can push the boundaries of what is acceptable.
Every guest must be initiated with menu one, and can only move on to two and then three on repeat visits. Baldessari runs rooms above the restaurant, so dedicated diners can sign up for the full experience over a long weekend.

Tamer dishes include an array of welcome bites, one made from pastry shaped as a ring that is topped with cauliflower purée and glistening, gemlike orbs of caviar. It is served in a jewellery box. A paper-thin wafer of sweet potato folded in half is held in the mouth of a bright red model ant with googly eyes.
A salad of greens – some thrillingly bitter, others fresh in flavour – that he has foraged from the nearby Dolomites mountains is captivating. An edible, semi-transparent film that covers the entire dish has to be torn apart with a fork to reach the leaves inside.
There is something surreal about it, like an alien life form in the damp undergrowth of the forest floor.
The forest is far from alien to Baldessari, however. He spent much of his childhood playing in the woods around the small alpine town of his birth, Roncegno Terme, which is about a ninety-minute drive from Aqua Crua.
There, he constructed hideaways from fallen branches, made dams in mountain streams and tried to catch fish with his bare hands. He was uninterested in school, and foraging for mushrooms with his father, who knew where to find the finest specimens throughout the seasons, was his favourite activity.

Later, when his parents divorced and his father’s alcoholism took a mental toll, he turned to drugs. While many of his friends from those reckless and self-destructive years lost their lives, cooking saved him. In the kitchen he found structure, precision and a place where he could express his creativity. It also kept his deep connection with nature intact.
Today, he continues to forage in the hillsides around Roncegno, and further afield in the Dolomites, at least once a week. He also has a plot of land where he is growing the local grape variety, and he keeps bee hives under the trees on the edge of a woodland, the honey from which he serves at breakfast.
Nature is solace for him, a place to still the mind and recharge his energy.
“I pick the plants myself from the forest. When we farm, we force plants to grow somewhere they don’t want to. Growing wild, they have a different energy. I want to bring this to the plate. You can taste it,” he says.

His sensitivity to nature left untamed extends also to animals: he prefers game meat from local hunters. Just-shot coot (a wild water bird) ends up encased in a delicate wrapper of saffron-shaded pasta, the meat decadently rich and succulent.
In menu three, tapping nature’s larder goes to new extremes. Here, conventional ideas of dining – such as that it needs to be delicious – must be set aside. Instead, diners must be willing to go beyond their comfort zones.
While providing exact details of certain dishes could get Baldessari in hot water, suffice to say that what he puts on the plate is provocative.
A tartlet topped with swallow saliva – which may not be a challenge to lovers of bird’s nest soup – has a bizarre texture in the mouth, gooey and slick like aerated melted marshmallow. A creature’s ear, boiled down to the cartilage, is like stiff plastic, in contrast to the wet, spongy masses of a bull’s testicles and its glistening gelatinous penis.


The fried skeleton of a frog, its pelvis stretched apart and toes curled, offers a few meagre nibbles, while a long black hair discovered in the otherwise normal risotto turns out, thankfully, to be decorative, trapped under the plate’s transparent glaze.
For dessert, crema carbonizzata – carbonised cream – is slate grey with mineral dust, topped with a layer of what looks like soil and sprinkled with pungent rounds of the roots of a mountain fern.
If it were any other chef, veering from the respectable classicism of Aqua Crua’s à la carte menu to the wild transgression of set menu three may come across as unconvincing or insincere. But Baldessari comfortably straddles these extremes. Even the menu states that it “reflects the bipolar soul of the chef who constantly oscillates between rigour and madness”.

Some diners will embrace the madness: one repeat guest was inspired, Baldessari says, to have his own latex suit made and sat with his family enjoying his dinner trussed up in kinship with the chef.
Other diners may prefer to fall back on Baldessari’s rigour. Either way, offering such a wide spectrum of gastronomic experiences means diners of varying predispositions may find their culinary comfort zone here. Fetish gear optional, of course.


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Food and Drinks

‘Latex chef’ of Michelin-star restaurant in Italy offers extreme menus that push limits

“Latex chef” Giuliano Baldessari, wearing his signature black rubber catsuit, prepares food in the kitchen at Aqua Crua in Barbarano Vicentino, Italy. Photo: Aqua Crua

Baldessari has worn a catsuit in the kitchen for about a decade. Photo: Aqua Crua

An edible, semi-transparent film that has to be torn apart covers salad greens foraged from the nearby Dolomites mountains in a dish at Aqua Crua. Photo: Aqua Crua

Baldessari regularly forages in the Dolomites. Photo: Victoria Burrows

A pastry ring topped with cauliflower purée and caviar, served in a jewellery box, at Aqua Crua. Photo: Victoria Burrows

Baldessari has his own beehives in the Dolomites mountains. Photo: Victoria Burrows

A dish of frog at Aqua Crua. Photo: Victoria Burrows

Bull’s testicles and penis at Aqua Crua. Photo: Victoria Burrows

Crema carbonizzata – carbonised cream – at Aqua Crua. Photo: Victoria Burrows

Starter bites at Aqua Crua. Photo: Aqua Crua

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Cole joined Hearth during the Covid pandemic. Photo: The Ritz-Carlton, Perth – Hearth Restaurant

Cole’s beetroot and kimchi black rice with lemon myrtle oil at Hearth. Photo: The Ritz-Carlton, Perth – Hearth Restaurant

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Hearth at The Ritz-Carlton, Perth. Photo: The Ritz-Carlton, Perth – Hearth Restaurant

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Food & Drink

Giuliano Baldessari of Italy’s Michelin-star Aqua Crua restaurant wears a catsuit that dampens his senses so he can focus on flavour


Giuliano Baldessari of Italy’s Michelin-star Aqua Crua restaurant wears a catsuit that dampens his senses so he can focus on flavour.


Italy

‘Latex chef’ of Michelin-star restaurant in Italy offers extreme menus that push limits

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Giuliano Baldessari of Italy’s Michelin-star Aqua Crua restaurant wears a catsuit that dampens his senses so he can focus on flavour

Giuliano Baldessari of Italy’s Michelin-star Aqua Crua restaurant wears a catsuit that dampens his senses so he can focus on flavour