Renato Rizzardi e Sergio Olivetti

Renato Rizzardi was born in Vicenza April 9, 1961. From an early age he shows a great love for the culinary arts, so much that at the age of 14  he endeavours in his first season in a mountain hotel, where he finds his true calling. In 1979 he graduated with honors at ‘institute for surveyors, but then rather than continue as teachers had suggested with marine engineering, he enrolled in the first year of the Hotel School in Recoaro. During the ‘summer working at the restaurant La Bulesca Rubano in the province of Padua, the work he likes very much and instead going back to school and attaining a certificate as a cook he chooses to continue working in the same restaurant for a year, until the draft comes and he enrolls in the compulsory military service.

Renato is distinguished by his capacity and served in the kitchens of  the Air Force in Vicenza, receiving a commendation at the end of the service by all the senior officers of the court. After a Summer work experience in the bakery of the village Valtur from Corfu in Greece, Renato is able to enter the restaurant San Domenico in Imola where he received the very basis of its preparation by the great Chef Valentino Marcattilii. For Renato this is the real turning point in his life: during the year and a half that he works there  he has the opportunity to know and work with the greatest Italian chefs period from the great maestro Gualtiero Marchesi, Aimo e Nadia, Feolde and many others. After the San Domenico,  Renato moves to the restaurant Il Pappagallo in Bologna, where he remained as second chef for about a year. In 1984 Renato makes the leap and is takes on the role of consultant chef for the restaurant Donatello in San Francisco, in the United States. The experience should be of short duration but instead lasts for one year, after which Renato becomes Exetutive chef of the restaurant and in 1985 was named Master Chef of California. For Renato, however, the dream is to open his own restaurant near Vicenza and to do that he returned to Italy and became chef of the restaurant Antico Brolo in Padua where he remained until the end of 1991, from that moment on, Renato is able to accomplish what right from ‘age of 14 years had been the’ fixed idea and on the January 1st 1992 buys La Locanda di Piero in Montecchio Precalcino.