About

Lorenzo Dal Bo is an Italian chef, food-system researcher and entrepreneur whose work investigates the relationships connecting food, people and the natural environment.

Born and raised in Bologna, Lorenzo developed an early interest in different food cultures and in the ways communities gather around a table. After completing his studies at ALMA, the International School of Italian Cuisine in Colorno, he began a professional journey that took him far beyond the conventional boundaries of restaurant cooking.

Since 2012, he has worked in some of the world’s most influential kitchens and gastronomic environments. His international experience includes Koks in the Faroe Islands, Noma in Copenhagen, Da Vittorio in Brusaporto and professional periods in New Zealand. He later moved to Lima, where he spent two years at Virgilio Martínez’s Central, becoming sous-chef. From 2019, he continued his career as sous-chef at Ice Q in Sölden, Austria.

These experiences exposed him to profoundly different territories, ingredients, techniques and cultural understandings of food. They also encouraged him to ask questions that went beyond the preparation of a dish.

What happens before an ingredient reaches the kitchen? Who cultivated, raised, harvested or transported it? What forms of knowledge made its existence possible? What is discarded along the way, and what could instead remain part of the system? How can cooking respond to the needs of the present without compromising those of future generations?

Over time, these questions became central to Lorenzo’s work.

His practice now combines cooking with research, education, creative direction and entrepreneurship. He is particularly interested in circular food systems, food preservation, fermentation, local biodiversity, responsible sourcing and the intelligent use of ingredients in their entirety.

For Lorenzo, circularity does not mean finding an ingenious use for something only after it has become waste. It begins much earlier. It influences the choice of producers, packaging, transportation, quantities and preparation methods. It requires understanding whether an ingredient should enter the kitchen at all, and how it can be valued without consuming more energy and resources than the recovery process justifies.

In 2023, Lorenzo founded BRENSO in Zurich, a temporary restaurant and zero-waste food project conceived as a living gastronomic manifesto. The project translated his research into a complete hospitality experience, combining root-to-leaf and nose-to-tail cooking, fermentation, preservation, local sourcing and a warm Mediterranean sense of welcome.

He later developed Cook the Loop and From Root to Leaves: two independent concepts that can take shape through workshops, conferences, pop-up dinners, temporary restaurants and collaborations with companies, institutions and cultural organisations.

Despite the complexity of the subjects he addresses, Lorenzo’s work remains grounded in a simple and profoundly human idea: preparing and sharing food is a way of caring for others.

His cooking seeks a balance between taste, beauty and health, but also between responsibility and pleasure. Sustainability should not remove joy from the table. On the contrary, curiosity, conviviality and shared discovery can make new food systems desirable, accessible and alive.