Gianfranco D'Ambra: The Ischia Chef Who Doesn't Chase Trends
Fifty years of cooking, character and research at Gabbiano Beach. In a time when restaurants increasingly seem to look alike, the story of a man who has chosen to measure his worth through his work and through the people who sit at his tables.
There are chefs who have built their careers through awards, television appearances, collaborations, four-hands dinners, photographs and social media. And then there are men who have spent fifty years behind a kitchen counter, in front of a fire, running a restaurant every single day and trying to satisfy hundreds of people. Gianfranco D'Ambra belongs to the second category. And that, perhaps, is precisely why I find his story worth telling.
Because at a time when restaurants, also through social media, seem increasingly similar to one another, my father has continued to do something that today feels almost unconventional: he looks at what everyone else is doing and decides not to become like them. It is not a pose, not a communication strategy, and not an attempt to appear different. It is simply his character. Gianfranco observes, studies, understands what is happening around him, and then chooses his own path.
Born on Ischia on 17 November 1960, he comes from a family of modest means and four children. Two of his siblings died as children. He attended nautical school and graduated without ever failing a year, but his life eventually took a different direction from the one he might have imagined. When he started working at Gabbiano, together with my mother, he was not a chef and had no formal background in hospitality.
The Gabbiano of those years was a much simpler place than the restaurant it would eventually become, frequented mainly by Germans and Neapolitans. And as often happens in a family business, there were no big job descriptions: you simply did whatever needed to be done. You cooked, served, washed dishes, prepared, cleaned up. Everything passed through the same hands.
The person who taught him more than anyone else how to work in a kitchen and how to run a restaurant was his mother-in-law, my grandmother Elena. From her he learned traditional cooking, but also organisation, the relationship with guests, and attention to the work itself. Nonna Elena was the chef at Gabbiano until Parkinson's made it increasingly difficult for her to continue. They had a very particular relationship. She was one of the few people who could truly bring him back down to earth.
Whenever Gianfranco reacted badly or let his temper take over, she would simply look at him and say, "È di Monterone…". A sentence that was enough to remind him where he came from and that, even today, says more about their relationship than a long explanation ever could.
Over the years, Gabbiano changed along with him. The guests changed, the island changed, expectations changed, and the cooking changed too. Neapolitans would arrive early, moving from the beach to the table and sometimes staying for hours, eating pasta, grilled fish and sautéed dishes. Germans would more often arrive in the afternoon for a cappuccino, a pizza or a dessert. Gianfranco learned to understand different kinds of guests, different rhythms and different expectations.
He realised that a restaurant is not simply a kitchen, and it is not simply a dish. It is a complex organism in which everything has to work. And little by little, he built the Gabbiano we know today, taking it from a small seaside place to a restaurant capable of welcoming people from completely different worlds.
His cooking grew in exactly the same way he did: through stubbornness, curiosity and research. When he studies a dish, he tries it, makes it again, changes it. If it does not turn out the way he wants, it is not good enough. One of his most repeated phrases is: "A dish cannot fail. I have to get there." That sentence contains a great deal of his way of working. It is not enough for something to be good. It has to correspond to the idea he has in his mind.
That is how some of the dishes that still define his cooking were created and developed: the Antipasto Imperiale, born at a time when starters were served across many separate plates and conceived as a way of bringing them together into a single presentation; the Paccheri Francesco; raw seafood; pasta with crustaceans; his approach to cooking fish; and, naturally, the zuppa di cozze, rooted in Nonna Elena's cooking tradition and continuously studied and refined by him.
In recent years, even bread has become the subject of a long period of research: two years of trials before he reached a result he felt truly belonged with Gabbiano's cuisine.
What is interesting is that his cooking does not fit easily into the categories we now use to describe modern restaurants. Where others may look for decoration, Gianfranco looks for the ingredient. Where there is an opportunity to chase innovation, he often returns to tradition. Where a dish risks becoming primarily something to photograph, he insists that it should first and foremost be something to eat.
He is not against presentation, and he is not against novelty. For him, they simply come later. First comes the product, the cooking, the flavour, the guest.
This is also where his character becomes a decisive part of his cooking. Today, with social media, it is easy to feel that restaurants are all beginning to look alike: the same collaborations, the same special evenings, the same four-hands dinners, the same contaminations, the same photographs, the same formats, the same ideas chasing one another and often repeating themselves. There is nothing wrong with collaborating with other chefs, of course. But Gianfranco has chosen not to build his career around it.
He does not organise dinners simply to put his name next to someone else's. He does not feel the need to constantly seek confirmation outside Gabbiano, and he has never needed to place his work inside a trend in order to give it value. The curious thing is that he does not do this because he is unaware of what is happening outside. He knows perfectly well.
He knows what other chefs are doing. He knows what works. He knows what gets photographed. He knows what performs well on social media.
He simply does not want to be like them.
His measure is much simpler: the work. And above all, his guests. In the end, they are the ones who decide whether what you do has value. A guest who comes back years later is worth more than a photograph. Someone who remembers a dish is worth more than a collaboration created to be talked about. A full dining room is worth more than the attention you might receive for a few days.
This is the belief my father has always had, and over time it has become almost a form of independence. He does not need other chefs to confirm the value of his cooking. He wants the people sitting at his tables to do it.
Perhaps that is also why, despite his character, so many people who have entered his professional life have remained close to him over the years. Gianfranco can be difficult to take. He is one of those people you can either love or simply not get along with, because he has never had much interest in making himself liked by everyone.
He likes humble people and cannot stand arrogance. He can be extraordinarily generous with someone he considers a good person and extremely hard on someone he sees as dishonest or disrespectful. He does not look only at someone's position or money. If a person behaves badly, to him they are simply a person behaving badly.
His honesty is probably his most obvious flaw and, at the same time, one of his greatest qualities. The problem is that his qualities are almost always also his weaknesses.
His ambition, especially when he was younger, made him move very fast and sometimes prevented him from paying enough attention to the people around him. He reprimanded people, he could be harsh, and there were times when work seemed to come before everything else. And if there is one person in front of whom he wishes he could have behaved differently, it is his own father, my grandfather.
He was the only person who could truly reprimand him and bring him back onto the right path. When he died, Gianfranco lost that point of reference, and for a long time he experienced it as being like a ship without a lighthouse in the middle of the sea. To me, that image says a great deal about how, behind the hardness everyone sees, there has always been a need for direction.
Over the years, that direction found an increasingly precise form in his idea of cooking and of what a restaurant should be. Gianfranco has never stopped studying dishes, experimenting, understanding and improving. In the kitchen he maintains an almost Olympic calm, even during a full service. He does not believe in rushing simply for the sake of speed, and he will not send out a dish just because it is supposed to go out.
If he needs a few extra minutes to do something properly, he takes them.
And that remains true even when the numbers become significant. He can manage quantities of pasta and crustaceans simultaneously that I still find difficult to understand, using methods I struggle to explain. I only know one thing: when service starts, he knows exactly where he wants to get.
Perhaps one of the stories that best explains his relationship with guests is the story of the zuppa di cozze prepared for Clive Davis.
The first one was perfect by Gabbiano's standards. It simply was not what he wanted. Clive wanted a much more liquid soup, with almost no shells, so that he could put his spoon into it and find everything ready to eat. It was completely different from our version.
Gianfranco made it again. It still wasn't right. He made it a second time. Then a third.
On the third attempt, Clive smiled. That was the one he wanted.
The first soup was not wrong. It was simply the wrong soup for that particular guest. And instead of defending his own idea, my father started again until he found the right one.
Over the years, countless people have passed through Gabbiano, and some have returned for reasons that went beyond the food. Dries Mertens, for example, comes back every year and finds Gianfranco again, with a relationship that over time has become human before becoming professional.
Then there are photographs that tell their own stories, like the one with Aurelio De Laurentiis, taken practically at the cash register. My father has always been an Inter supporter, which perhaps makes that photograph even more amusing.
But none of these photographs has ever represented a résumé to him. They are memories.
For Gianfranco, the value of Gabbiano has never been about being able to say who has been there. It has always been about what those people ate and why they came back.
In more than fifty years of work, Gianfranco has built much more than a kitchen. He has built an organisation, a mentality and a method. He has trained people who worked alongside him and who, following his way of understanding the profession, later built their own paths.
He learned how to choose ingredients, how to buy, how to negotiate with suppliers, how to manage a dining room, a kitchen, a service, a business. He has been a chef, entrepreneur, father, grandfather, sounding board and guide. For many people, he has also been someone they could turn to for advice.
What strikes me when I look at him today is that, despite everything he has built, he has never felt the need to turn himself into a character. He never truly chased the world of food criticism, nor did he build his career around awards or exposure. His result has always been the restaurant.
His result is the quality of the work, the service, the food, the guest who comes back.
It is a very concrete way of measuring things, almost an old-fashioned one, especially at a time when we can sometimes confuse the story told about a restaurant with the actual value of the restaurant itself.
Gianfranco, instead, has always wanted the things themselves to speak for him. And in that sense, his philosophy may be summed up in a sentence he has repeated for years:
"What makes me feel good is what I want, not what other people want."
It does not mean ignoring the guest. It means refusing to build his identity solely around what other people want to see. He wants people to desire his things. He wants the product to convince them, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps that is the characteristic that most defines Gabbiano.
Not the attempt to be different, but the refusal to become the same.
In a world where everything can be copied very quickly — from a photograph to a dish, from an evening format to an entire concept — Gianfranco has continued to defend something very simple: his own idea.
Where others seek confirmation, he seeks results. Where others seek visibility, he seeks quality. Where a dish is expected to tell a story, he wants it to have something to say to the palate first. And where the restaurant world sometimes seems to need to constantly look around itself, he continues to look at his own tables.
If he had to start again from scratch today, he would probably say that hospitality takes a great deal and gives even more back only when you approach it with passion, research and conviction. And perhaps, in the end, he would still choose the same path.
Because what began for him as a necessity eventually became something much bigger: a way of living, working and building.
My father has spent fifty years building his own space without waiting for anyone to tell him what it should be. He did not follow a school, a trend or a model. He observed, made mistakes, learned, insisted and started again.
He took what he had and turned it into something that did not exist before.
And perhaps that, in the end, is his most authentic form of originality.
Gianfranco D'Ambra has never needed to be like anyone else.
He has simply wanted to get where he decided he was going.