Born in Florence in 1990, Simone Caponnetto has been Executive Chef of Locale Firenze (Palazzo Concini) since September 2021. After stints at Narisawa, Mugaritz and Heinz Beck, he relaunched the restaurant–cocktail bar that reached No. 36 on The World’s 50 Best Bars 2024.
After graduating from Florence’s hospitality school, Caponnetto embarked on a decade-long international apprenticeship: Narisawa ** in Tokyo, Mugaritz ** in the Basque Country, La Pergola *** in Rome under Heinz Beck, plus a stage at The Waterside Inn with Alain Roux. These milestones shaped a Tuscan-rooted cuisine filtered through Japanese fermentation techniques and Iberian minimalism.
Back in Italy in 2019, he followed Il Nugolo in Florence—an avant-garde bistro that drew media attention for its fermented vegetables and closed-loop Cinta Senese pork. In September 2021 he took the helm of Locale Firenze, a restaurant-cocktail bar set in the 16th-century cellars of Palazzo Concini.
Caponnetto cuts salt by 25 percent thanks to house-made shio-koji and curbs waste by turning citrus scraps into shrubs for the bar run by Matteo Di Ienno—a synergy that propelled Locale Firenze to No. 36 on The World’s 50 Best Bars 2024, the first Florentine venue ever listed.
He sources only suppliers within 70 km, uses Tuscan PGI extra-virgin olive oil and cooks over Chianti holm-oak embers, while embracing Japanese touches (Pisana-beef katsuobushi, sheep-milk shoyu) and Spanish low-pressure infusions. “Modernity means letting the land speak without special effects,” he told Falstaff.
