MARIANNA VITALE, KNOWLEDGE AND DETERMINATION TO BECOME A STARRED CHEF

Great chef, manager, and owner of SUD, the restaurant in Quarto Flegreo, a small town in the province of Naples, is relentless, and continues to receive recognition for her impressive skills. The latest one, “Michelin Female Chef Award 2020”, was awarded to her at the 5th edition of the Veuve Clicquot’s Atelier des Grandes Dames event. The event is a way for the champagne house’s network to celebrate women’s talent in haute cuisine. In Marianna Vitale’s own words “SUD is a small idea with many words. Love and passion, fury and fatigue. Anxiety and joy, research and work. Words that are the blocks with which we have built our way of being in the world, the way of the South.” Marianna Vitale is from Naples, and more precisely from a neighborhood called Porta Capuana, where she was born in 1980. She grew up “in a house full of people, a seaport where people came and went, and ate at all hours of the day, and where I’d come across more pots and pans than I would toys.” Her father was a professional chef and she had always wanted to attend a culinary school. Her mother, however, disagreed, as “the family’s expectations were different and that kind of school was only for boys to attend.”

In 2004, she graduated summa cum laude in Spanish and literature having written a thesis on the myth of “The Feast with the Statue”. She then began working as a tour guide, though, eventually, she managed to get accepted into Palazzo Petrucci’s kitchen where she could learn from Lino Scarallo. Thanks to her determination, in 2009 Vitale opened her own restaurant together with Pino Esposito. Just two years later, she was crowned best emerging chef by Italy’s most prominent financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, while in 2012, she became one of the 168 chefs heading a Michelin-starred restaurant around the globe (43 of which are Italian). In 2015, she received two “Best Chef in Italy” awards from L’espresso and Identità Golose. That same year, her I’mpepata’ became “dish of the year” for Il Mattino, one of Naples’ leading newspapers. In 2017, Identità Golose awarded her its Identità Donna award, whereas 2018 saw her becoming one of the women of the year for the Lydia Cottone “Napoli è donna” award. An impressive career for Chef Vitale, and great acknowledgement for her restaurant, as, just this past year, SUD was nominated by Gambero Rosso 2020 guides, best Italian restaurant for pasta dishes. Vitale’s comment to this was: “While awards might make you happy for a moment, what’s more important is that they give you the motivation you need to keep moving forward, and the awareness that you can do good things even in a small town like Quarto, amongst thousands of obstacles.”