About Us

My name is Francesco Greco and I was born in Sardinia (Italy) in 1970. I represent the third generation on chefs in my family after my Mom Eliana and her mother Karoline. All started with Karoline, Hungarian; in the mid 20s she was the family chef for the Rothschild family in Paris. She was of Ashkenazi Jew ancestry, so as the political environment turned to the worst in France, the Rothschild family emigrated to join their relative in UK and Karoline, with a handsome severance pay bought a small farm in the south of France where she met my grandfather escaping from Italy as anti fascist. There my mother was born and started learning the rudiments of haute cuisine. After the end of WWII, they all came back to Tuscany, Italy, where they built a small hotel which still exists and is now operated by my first cousins. There, my mother met my father, at that time a young Navy Officer and they ended up in Cagliari, Sardinia’s capital. My mom kept the good habit to serve us very good meals, and after the divorce she went back to her chef job in prestigious hotels around the Island. I started to be interested in food very early, when I was still in primary school, when I always wanted to go to the local markets with Mom to learn how to recognize good produces. It was a different time, there were no big supermarket and shopping food was more a face to face with local producers and retailers, so I learned the basics of selecting goods for their true quality and deal with the retailers, many of which were already more like friends than retailers… In 1986 I followed my mother for a summer season in North Sardina, S.ta Teresa di Gallura, a 5 stars hotel where Mom was the Chef. I started as a bell boy, carrying luggage up and down in my bright red uniform with brass buttons. A month later, my Mom moved me in the kitchen and as steward, in charge of cleaning huge pans and pots, that was my first contact with a professional kitchen, something that radically changed my life for all the years to come! By the end of that summer I was already promoted to Cook Helper at the staff canteen first and later in the main kitchen. Returned to school I decided to change it for a hotel school, while still working in kitchens during the summer breaks and I got my diploma in 1989. The same year I went to work in a Michelin star restaurant in Alghero but just one year later I had to attend my military duties as they were mandatory at that time. I spend my year of service guess where? In the kitchen, obviously, cooking for privates, non commissioned officers and officers, so in the end was a pretty good experience and surprisingly I learned a lot of things too. Done with my duties, I started to put all my efforts in building my career. I traveled extensively in the Americas, Middle East, North Africa and most of Europe, always eager to discover new flavors, techniques and ingredients. In 2003 I was in the process to settle down. I was in the North of Italy, working my summer season around the Garda lake, when an old acquaintance, a pizza maker who worked with me years earlier, contacted me out of the blue to offer a job in Thailand. Honestly I didn’t want to go, I wanted to settle down, perhaps building a family but he begged me to at least talk on the phone with his boss as he promised to find a chef for him. Few days later, an Australian guy called me from Bangkok to offer me a job and politely but firmly I declined the offer. Without my knowledge, the Aussie came to Italy and without announcing came for lunch in the restaurant I was working. He asked to talk with the chef so I went out to take his order, still not knowing who the guy was. He asked me to prepare for him something to “impress” him, no budget nor dietary constrains, just something memorable. That’s something doesn’t happen very often, but when it does happen is always a challenge I take seriously and with pleasure, so I concocted a simple “Spaghetti al pomodoro”. It is part of my philosophy, a dish does not need to be complicated or exotic to be good, it doesn’t need to be expensive either. A simple dish can be memorable if you make it memorable. So I picked the best cherry tomatoes, red, ripe but still firm. I blanched them in boiling water then carefully peeled one by one. I heated a whole garlic clove, delicately crushed with its skin and fried slowly in the best extra virgin olive oil I had (in that area they actually produce one of the finest extra virgin olive oil in Italy), regulating the heat carefully to avoid burning the oil. Then I removed the garlic and added the tomatoes, stirring carefully to avoid breaking them, a sprinkle of natural sea salt and a hint of freshly ground pepper for seasoning. In the meanwhile, I cooked the spaghetti to just 2/3 of their cooking time and finished the cooking in the pan with the condiment, slowly, adding cooking water little by little to let the starch in the pasta amalgamate and emulsify the oil in the tomato juices. Only at the end, to preserve the full flavor, few leaves (the small and tender ones) of basil just picked from the garden to complete the dish. Plated simply and delivered quickly to the table with a side of grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese for the guest’s enjoinment. The Aussie called me back to table, he complimented for the dish and asked me to pay him visit in a nearby hotel in a few days, I still didn’t know who he was. So I went to visit him and finally introduced himself. I repeated that I was NOT interested, that I was sorry he came all the way from Thailand for nothing and I was going to leave when he  handed me an envelope. There were a couple of thousands euros in cash and a flight ticket, round trip, Milano to Bangkok open one year. He told me that the content of the envelope was mine any way, I only had one commitment: work for him two weeks, then I would decide to either sign a two years contract, perhaps pretty generous or take a paid holiday in the city of angels and return back to Italy, no offence taken. I took the offer although skeptical and I landed in Bangkok on the 28th of August 2003 at 7:40 am. I signed the contract after one week and I returned to Italy first time 13 years later, in 2016 with a Thai wife and three daughters; needless to say, the original flight ticked was expired… I lived and worked in Bangkok for about 7 years, in which I worked for stand alone high end restaurants and then hotel. In 2004 I met my wife, and few months later we were living together and planning our first child which came punctually one year later. And then the second arrived less than two years later. In 2010 I received a job offer as Executive Chef at Cape Sienna Gourmet Hotel and Villas in Phuket where I worked for the following 13 years until 2023 when I went retired. In the meanwhile we had another child, in 2014 and we fostered another two children few years later. The elder of my daughters, Camilla, joined a prestigious hotel school in Bangkok, thus continuing the long standing family tradition well over a century and 4 generations!​