Procida-born chef Marco Ambrosino leads the gastronomic restaurant Sustanza, housed inside ScottoJonno in Naples. His cuisine stems from an anthropological exploration of the Mediterranean, blending cultural research, contemporary technique and a vision that connects history, ingredients and people.
Born in Procida in 1984, Marco Ambrosino grew up surrounded by the sea, ports and cultural crossings — a background that would later become the matrix of his culinary identity. As a young man, he alternated scientific high school and Economics studies with early work in local pizzerias and restaurants, while nurturing a deep passion for drawing and the dream of becoming an anthropologist-journalist. These influences would resurface powerfully in his gastronomic approach.
His turning point came at age 23, when he joined the brigade at Il Melograno in Ischia, then a one-Michelin-starred restaurant led by Libera Iovine. There he discovered a vocation for cooking and for fine dining as a space of study, technique and cultural depth. During those five years, he experienced two defining encounters: the love for his future wife and the realization that gastronomy would become his life’s work.
Ambrosino then embarked on a series of formative experiences alongside major chefs and new culinary languages. The most influential was his time at Noma in Copenhagen, at the time the world’s number-one restaurant according to The World’s 50 Best. There he understood that cuisine can be built on a radical identity even in territories with limited biodiversity, and that narrative is as essential as technique. This intuition seeded his lifelong vision of the Mediterranean as a space of research, creolization and cultural exchange.
In 2014, he moved to Milan to lead the kitchen of 28 Posti, where he could finally connect the “dots” of his personal and intellectual path: anthropology, critical thinking, ingredients, memory and community. Here he defined his culinary language, inspired by great port cities and by the cultural flows that have shaped Naples and the entire Mediterranean basin over centuries. In 2019, together with his wife and architect Simona Castagliuolo, he founded Collettivo Mediterraneo, a social and cultural inclusion project exploring the stories, biodiversity and identities of Mediterranean peoples.
The return to southern Italy came in 2021, when entrepreneur Luca Iannuzzi — engaged in the architectural revival of the Galleria Principe di Napoli — invited him to lead the gastronomic project of the new restaurant Sustanza, inaugurated in 2023 within ScottoJonno. For Ambrosino, this marked a symbolic homecoming: a cuisine built on the Mediterranean as an anthropological, historical and cultural landscape.
At Sustanza he created a menu structured around ingredients, places and suggestions rather than codified dishes. The experience becomes a journey through Mediterranean landscapes, peoples and rituals: Middle Eastern and Asian fermentations, ancestral preservation methods, humble ingredients used in their entirety, talismanic elements that carry stories and territories. The essence of the raw material and the narrative surrounding it are always at the core of the gastronomic experience.
Today, Marco Ambrosino continues his work with a renewed sense of maturity, shaped also by fatherhood — an invitation to care for time, stories and places. This sensibility guides every aspect of his cooking: a dialogue between memory, material culture and a Mediterranean that is not merely a geography, but a way of seeing the world.
