Fabio Trabocchi’s refined Italian cuisine has its roots in his childhood in Le Marche, on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Like several generations before him, his father was a sharecropper who often cooked traditional dishes for the family. One of his earliest memories is waking on a Sunday morning to find his father simmering duck ragù on the stove and making gnocchi dough on the table for the family’s supper of gnocchi col sugo di papera.
He trained at Senigallia’s Istituto Alberghiero Panzini before apprenticing in Milan with Gualtiero Marchesi, a pioneer of modern Italian cuisine. His career subsequently took him to London, Spain, Moscow, and New York.
Trabocchi’s U.S. breakthrough came at Maestro, which he opened in 2001 at The Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia. There, he was named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs in 2002 and won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic in 2006. In 2007, he moved to New York City to lead Fiamma, which closed in 2009 amid the Great Recession.
Back in Washington, D.C., he opened Fiola, a high-end Italian restaurant in Penn Quarter, in 2011. The following year, Bon Appétit included it among America’s 50 best new restaurants, and the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington named it Best New Restaurant.
He followed with Fiola Mare in 2014, bringing Italian coastal cooking to Georgetown’s waterfront. His approachable pasta house, Sfoglina, opened in 2016 and now has three locations in the Washington, D.C., area. In 2017, he opened Del Mar, a celebration of Spanish coastal dining at The Wharf.
His projects also include Seta su Ilma and Seta su Luminara, tasting menu restaurants aboard The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection’s Ilma and Luminara, and Fiolina, an Italian restaurant at Washington Dulles International Airport.
“We constantly must reinvent ourselves, while questioning ourselves and our capabilities,” says Trabocchi. “You must keep evolving. This work of mine, this obsession, is a train that never stops.”
