Restaurants that offer gluten-free food may be getting easier to find, but the options on the menu are often still limited. Italian-born Gabriele Vitali, a former banker turned restaurateur, found this to be especially true for his home country’s cuisine in London, where he now lives.
Vitali decided to take on a challenge: to launch the first totally gluten-free Italian restaurant in the UK. The result was Leggero, in the heart of Soho, a restaurant Vitali says caters to everyone, whether they’re an Italian foodie, health-conscious, or coeliac.
“We wanted to create a place where everybody felt welcome to choose everything from the menu,” Vitali says. “We also didn’t want customers to be able to spot the menu was even gluten-free.”
Vitali hadn’t always set out to open a restaurant. As a teenager in Milan, he found he was good with numbers, and so his father encouraged him to try his hand in finance. After studying finance at university, Vitali’s dream of working in the hustle and bustle of a big city became reality: he moved to London and became an investment banker.
But after 11 years of working in the finance world, he needed a change. “I thoroughly enjoyed working in finance,” Vitali says, “but I was growing weary of the monotonous banking life. I was doing the same thing all the time and over very long hours. I realised I needed a challenge. I wanted to create something new for myself.”
With the support of friends and family, Vitali quit his job and took the leap to start a new career in Italian cuisine. He went back to school, and studied an MBA so he could set up a new business.
Vitali admits he didn’t know much about the restaurant business before he entered it – what he did know was numbers and good Italian food. He grew up surrounded by family who made fresh, homemade pasta, and spent many hours observing and helping his two grandmothers – who he describes as “old-school chefs” – as they cooked traditional Italian dishes.
“One of my grandmothers cooked meat and pasta for us every Sunday,” he says. “She loved gorgonzola cheese, and she used to put tons of it on polenta. We’d eat so much and be stuffed like a duck, then sleep all afternoon!
“My other grandma made pasta from scratch. She taught me how important it was to make fresh food, and showed me how to make ravioli and tortellini. I used to play with flour and I’d make a mess in the kitchen.”
Vitali took inspiration from his grandmothers’ cooking styles and recipes, and combined their traditional heritage dishes with fresh, new ingredients. “We want to keep the menu simple, but add a modern twist.”
At first, Vitali’s restaurant – which opened in 2013 – served mostly polenta, a dish that’s famous in his native northern Italy, where he spent the first years of his life. However, he found there wasn’t as much interest in the traditional cuisine as he’d hoped. He realised he needed to revive his restaurant menu and direction – and to do so, he needed the help of a business partner.
Vitali teamed up with Silvio Vangelisti, a 55-year-old former dentist and fellow Italian, who joined him in relaunching the restaurant as a gluten-free hot spot. “Silvio’s a master of gluten-free pasta, and I’m a master of Excel spreadsheets,” he says. “We make a good team!”
Earlier this year, the pair renamed the restaurant Leggero, meaning “light” in Italian. Vitali says the name reflects the “light, healthy food” but also that he wants customers to feel “free” and not weighed down by the day-to-day toll of stressful life.
While some restaurants only offer a handful of gluten-free options, the pair decided to go one step further and make it 100% gluten-free, after they’d noticed increasing numbers of customers asking for gluten-free options. Everything on the menu was redesigned to be gluten-free, even the beer, thanks to Peroni Nastro Azzurro.
The premium beer brand had a similar mission to Vitali when it set out to create its gluten-free beer. It successfully stripped out all the gluten without compromising on the crisp, refreshing taste you expect from Peroni Nastro Azzurro. The result, Peroni Nastro Azzurro Gluten Free, is entirely safe to drink for coeliacs and has even been certified and endorsed by the Italian Coeliac Association.
It’s a vital accolade for Leggero, which has itself been endorsed by Coeliac UK, the UK’s leading charity for those with coeliac disease. Vitali says it was important to him and his team to partner with the gluten-free community. And it wasn’t hard for Leggero to become an instant favourite – one customer online described the restaurant as a “mecca for people with coeliac disease”.
For months, they worked with Giuseppe Russo, their head chef from Trapani, Sicily, and staff, trying different types of flour, pasta and ingredients to build their perfect menu. The staff – who come from both northern and southern Italy – all chipped in to offer their own suggestions for dishes.
“For Italians, pasta is a religion,” he says, smiling. “We knew we had to get it perfect, and so we had to make gluten-free pasta identical to the pasta we are used to eating. So we kept trying lots of options – gluten-free flour is very tough to work with – and eventually we landed on the right pasta.”
The menu changes three to four times a year, based on seasonal ingredients and popular dishes. And the food speaks for itself: handmade sorghum tagliatelle with asparagus, avocado, pecorino cheese and egg; black ravioli stuffed with fresh salmon; handmade pink ravioli stuffed with gorgonzola cheese and beetroot. The menu is an Italian foodies dream, and few would be able to notice that it’s all gluten-free.
As Leggero’s popularity continues to grow, Vitali has plans to open new restaurants, and hopes to one day to sell their gluten-free pasta direct. Often, satisfied customers ask Francesco Bini, his store manager and the friendly face who runs the restaurant floor, if they’ll expand in other countries. “We just had a Canadian guy ask if we’d consider opening up shop over there!”
And Vitali’s other plans for the future? “One week of holiday,” he says, “maybe in 2018!”
Peroni Nastro Azzurro Gluten Free is available at all major supermarkets nationwide, including Tesco and Sainsbury’s. You can also enjoy Peroni Nastro Azzurro Gluten Free in restaurants nationwide, including Pizza Express and Carluccio’s.
