Michele Casadei Massari

For the UN’s 80th Anniversary, Michele Casadei Massari Built a Table Without Borders

10 Minute read

12 Dec 2025

Ari Bendersky

Writer

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Selected as the first outside chef to design the UN’s Anniversary dinner, Massari crafted a menu rooted in conviviality, culture, and global understanding.

When Michele Casadei Massari walked into the kitchen at United Nations headquarters earlier this year, he didn’t check how many burners worked or inspect the walk-in coolers. Instead, the chef and owner of New York City’s intimate Lucciola restaurant asked each kitchen worker what they loved to eat.

With this, Massari started creating a team of 14 people with diverse backgrounds, voices, and perspectives who helped him prepare the menu for a gala with a global audience: the UNCA Awards Gala celebrating the UN’s 80th anniversary. In doing so, he became the first outside chef to create and execute the dinner.

As the conductor of this grand affair, Massari assessed the strengths of his team so he could weave them together into an arrangement presented on each plate.

"I want to bring their voices out," Massari said. "My job is to give voice to everyone and turn that into a melody that feels like a ‘Michele composition’ with their instruments."

This approach defines Massari's philosophy as he prepared to cook for approximately 350 diplomats, dignitaries, and global leaders at the United Nations Correspondents Association dinner, a historic gala inside the UN’s Delegates Lounge and Flag Hall. Selected for this honor, the Bologna-born chef saw the massive event exactly as he sees service at his well-regarded 18-seat Upper West Side restaurant: an opportunity to use food as a universal language that transcends politics, borders, and conflict.

"For me, cooking is the strongest form of art; it’s a form of expression," Massari said. "Having the chance to welcome, to gather people, and to use the table as a canvas for a major conversation is the point."

No matter how large his audience, his mission remains identical: create meaningful connections through food that speaks when words cannot.

UN Gala Menu

Breaking Bread, Breaking Barriers

The evening’s concept centered on a deliberately provocative question: How can a table bring people closer without the chef being present? Massari’s answer lay in a convivial family-style service and dishes designed to spark conversation, debate, and recognition, where the focus became entirely about the meal.

"I had to kill the ego of the chef. I had to disappear," he explained. "Most people in the room will not know who I am. They will not be influenced by my presence. The food must do all the work."

The evening started with a cocktail reception featuring passed appetizers that reflected the chef’s Italian heritage while drawing on broader Mediterranean influences, including truffle arancino, polenta with brie and fig jam, Spanish gilda skewers with olives, anchovy, and Parmigiano Reggiano, and prosciutto di Parma tartelettes alongside a vegan version with pesto rosso.

Guests found their tables pre-set with colorful mezze, antipasti, and dim sum, a landscape of flavors drawn from multiple cultures. At the center was a basket featuring bread from around the world—naan, chapati, piadina, and puri—intended to break down barriers from the outset.

To enjoy the bread, diners needed to ask tablemates to pass communal dips and spreads. Massari predicted this could help spark spirited exchanges: someone insisting their family made a better version, another recognizing a childhood flavor, perhaps even friendly arguments about whether a dish was called injera or farinata.

No News Is Good News

The main course carried the provocative title No News Is Good News, offering three variations of the Bolognese petroniana: beef cheeks slow-boiled bollito style, a vegetarian potato version, or a pescatarian-friendly Chilean sea bass. The course’s theme drew inspiration from a line in the Italian film Il Gattopardo, loosely translated as “Everything changes so that everything can remain the same.”

"When you have too much news, you end up with no news," Massari said. "It is like when you go beyond five ingredients in a dish. What does it taste like at that point? I think ‘no news is good news’ is one of the strongest messages we can send. It is like asking for a moment of silence. What you really do is elevate some sounds and cancel others."

Sustainability threaded through every choice of the meal, just as it does at Lucciola. Rather than showcase expensive cuts, Massari chose beef cheeks deliberately.

"We cannot create a dinner like this by playing with ingredients such as caviar in a way that is elitist and not accessible to most cultures," he said. "When you go home, you should feel you can recreate some part of what you ate. By using cheeks at a gala of this level, I'm saying this cut belongs at that table, too."

The Science of Hospitality

When he was younger, Massari studied medicine at the Università di Bologna while working in restaurants and technology. Over time, he felt the pull toward culinary work, especially after taking a course on the science of eating, and he developed a passion for learning about other cultures through travel. The gala became a culmination of those early experiences, a place where he folded those lessons into his cooking.

"Medicine and cooking, for me, were two ways of responding to the same need: to make people feel better, to communicate, and to express myself," he explained. "That is why I talk so much about temperature, factors, and the science behind dishes. That part of my education stayed inside me."

Temperature, for him, became a strategy to accommodate the unpredictability of a large-scale event like the gala and a key factor in the meal. Massari intentionally set the starting courses at room temperature to highlight how "many of the greatest foods in history were never refrigerated," he said.

In this way, Massari honored the many cultures around the world that eat this way, using a simple technique to bring people together through something many would find familiar.

Not “Just a Big Dinner”

Despite the historic venue and distinguished guest list, including fellow Italian chef Massimo Bottura of three-Michelin-starred Osteria Francescana, who was honored as Global Advocate of the Year, Massari maintained a remarkable perspective.

"The way I approach cooking has to be meaningful," he said. "I do not believe there is a cuisine that comes first or after, or a menu that works for one crowd but not for another. Whether it is six guests or a thousand, my question is always the same: Do I have the right idea and the right connection to the people I’m cooking for, for these guests, and for this evening?"

This philosophy has earned Massari trust far beyond his intimate restaurant. As corporate executive chef for Ferrari North America, culinary director for the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, and the chef behind gastronomic experiences at major events ranging from the Venice Film Festival with Italian film company I Wonder Pictures to the World Economic Forum, he has proven that his approach scales beautifully, not by changing his values but by amplifying them. This extended to the UN gala.

"It's not just another dinner," he said. "This is another great occasion to cook things I believe in and to offer my full vision of hosting and hospitality."

When the dinner concluded, Massari hoped guests would leave discussing recipes, debating techniques, and remembering family traditions.

"I hope they walk away feeling how fun it is to share what we love most," he said. "I imagine people saying, 'Those flavors were so simple, so homey. This is the first gala dinner I've been to where the food really tasted like something.'"

In a world fractured by division, Massari offered the oldest form of diplomacy: a shared table, familiar flavors, and the quiet insistence that what we hold in common matters far more than our differences.

"Food has the power to make everybody equal," Massari said. "Who can seriously say that Indian, North African, South African, or any other cuisine is less or more than another? Nobody."

12 Dec 2025