Cosimo Lippi

Raised in an international setting, between Italian, French and English, I studied Political Science in Florence, specialising in International Relations, with an Erasmus year in Amsterdam. The decisive step was the internship in Brussels: more than a year at BusinessEurope, the organisation that represents European business. I followed relations with the European Parliament and communications, and saw at close range what managing complexity means: many parts in play, none to be left behind.

That is where what I had studied took shape. It is the thread that runs through everything that came after.

A spell as a sports journalist, alongside my first years in restaurants, belongs to the same education.

01the dining room

Restaurants began in 2004, front of house, at Sésame, a French and Moroccan restaurant: anyone who remembers it knows what a place it was. That is where I learnt the trade. Then Il Latini and Trattoria 4 Leoni, two Florentine institutions. Until 2011 they were my school: big numbers, the pace of a full service, the customer in front of you, every evening.

In 2012 came the first opening: Giardino degli Aranci, a restaurant in Bagnaia on the island of Elba. For a whole season the dining room was mine, from day one.

02management

In January 2013 came the first full management: Dalla Lola, a neighbourhood trattoria in Santo Spirito known until then only for lunch. From then on, it opened in the evening with me. The kitchen stayed with the chef, who set the day’s menu and placed the orders, and the owners kept an eye on things; everything else was mine: the room, the offer, the selling, the till and the accounts. The neighbourhood-trattoria spirit was already there, and instead of changing it I built on it: the place became busy. For me it was the step from service to management: numbers and people were added to the customer.

03the kitchen

In 2014 I moved into the kitchen.

Ditta Artigianale was opening its first café and had entrusted the kitchen project to BRAC, which put me forward to run it: I was in charge from opening day. The idea of the food offer born with that work is still the one the place carries: it has adapted over time, as it should, but the identity of the product has stayed coherent with what it was then. Today the brand has several locations.

04the openings

From 2015 my work became, above all, bringing new places to life. At Gurdulù, a bistro and cocktail bar in the Oltrarno, I ran the dining room from opening day. In 2017 I followed the arrival in Florence of Il Polpaio, a brand the city did not yet have: a seasonal kiosk within the Estate Fiorentina, run with full autonomy. From the first months of 2018 I directed the opening of Atelier de’ Nerli, a seasonal Italian restaurant in San Frediano. It opened in July 2019, after a year and a half of preparation and management: a very complex project, with budget, suppliers, staff and timings all to be brought together for opening day.

An opening is the moment when no part can run late on the others. What I had observed in Brussels, here I was doing with my own hands.

05the relaunch

In 2020 I ran Adagio, a restaurant in the centre of Florence coming out of the first lockdown. With no investment we brought it back to the position it deserved and gave it stability, in management and in the numbers, for more than two years. There I also saw what existing online is worth today: reviews, presence, what comes up when someone searches a name, all weigh on the value of a business.

06planning

In 2023 I set up a project of my own, Ristorto di Valle, in Fiesole: a farm with a restaurant. I did the feasibility study and the business plan, with a complexity no restaurant had ever asked of me: a farm is planned on much longer timescales, and the plan has to be built on those timescales. It was a hard project, and for that very reason a push forward: for the first time I was thinking an enterprise through from the start, before it existed, with the dining room, management, the kitchen and the openings all in it at once.

After this experience, at Villa Bardini, in the first year of the new management of the open-air bar, I worked on floor operations and on training the team: a very large, very busy venue served by very limited production areas, where everything depended on the flow of work. Since 2024 I have worked as a consultant.

Each stage added something to the one before: the customer from the dining room, numbers and people from management, the product from the kitchen, the synchrony of the parts from the openings, stability from the relaunch, long timescales from planning.