Giovanni Ricci

Giovanni Ricci was born in Milan, trained in restaurant kitchens in Emilia-Romagna and Naples before the age of twenty-five, and has spent the decade since writing about Italian food from New York — where the distance from the original has sharpened rather than dulled his critical eye. He covers the full range of Italian cooking in North America: the red-sauce Italian-American tradition he respects for what it became rather than what it borrowed, the regional Italian rooms that get the sourcing and the technique right, and the pasta programs serious enough to justify the prices they charge. He is one of the few critics on the continent who writes about Southern Italian and Sicilian cooking with the specificity those traditions deserve, and his annual survey of New York's Italian restaurants is among the most-shared pieces TastyPals publishes. Before joining TastyPals, he was the Italian food correspondent for a New York-based international food magazine and contributed a weekly column on pasta to a widely-read food newsletter. He holds a Level 2 qualification from the Associazione Italiana Sommelier and writes about Italian wine alongside the food.

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