Saturday, October 9, 7:00 pm
Members $100, guests $125

Fact or fiction: A young chef barely in his 20s goes to Italy to hone his rough-hewn skills. The owners of a beloved two-star restaurant, seeing the chef’s innate gifts, leave their thriving summertime business in his charge while they go to France to study under Michel Guérard. While the owners are away, Michelin inspectors make several anonymous visits. The result? Ristorante Don Alfonso 1890 wins a long-awaited and greatly coveted third star.

It’s all true, and it happened to the uncommonly talented Dante deMagistris, chef at Blu. How he has reconciled classic American cuisine with the Italian soul of his Amalfi sojourn has used up quite a lot of ink stateside ever since his return, a fact that led the sassy Improper Bostonian to comment, “OK, so enough already. You’ve heard all the raves about this place. It can’t possibly live up to the hype, right? Wrong. The white-hot restaurant…is worthy of all the hyperbole.”

DeMagistris’s career arc seems surprisingly long for a 27-year-old without formal training. After his life-altering, yearlong stay in Italy, he returned home and worked alongside some of Boston’s culinary legends, including Michael Schlow at Café Louis, Danielle Baliani at Pignoli, and Eric Brennan at The Federalist. His on-the-job training has paid off at Blu. The restaurant has been listed on Bon Appétit’s Best of the Year roster and it secured spots on Boston magazine’s Best of List for two years in a row. The Boston Globe gave it three and half stars. DeMagistris himself has been featured in the pages of Food & Wine and Forbes (as one of Ten Cooks with Heat). DeMagistris, according to Boston, is a “27-year-old Belmont native who has won the hearts and stomachs of Bostonians with his culinary style.”

Just what is that style? His own take on what he does in the kitchen is make “sophisticated American classics with an Italian soul.” But however you describe it, DeMagistris has, per Corby Kummer in Boston, “an unusually sure sense of what tastes right...I can predict that he will cut a national figure with diners who seek out food with true flavors and that extra something—that ingredient that lifts a dish to the inspired.”

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