With a Gold medal and two Silver medals at the Global Chefs Challenge in Abu Dhabi, CAST Alimenti is once again confirmed as the School of World Champions

The twenty-first gold is added to the CAST Alimenti medal collection. As official partner of NIC, the Italian National Chefs which is part of the Italian Federation of Chefs, the school hosted the training of the blue team in its headquarters in Brescia in preparation for the global challenge of the Global Chefs Challenge which was held in Abu Dhabi from 30 May to 2 June.

A bit of CAST “flew” to the capital of the United Arab Emirates too: Angelo Biscotti, coach of the junior chef NIC team, teacher and executive chef in CAST and Luigi D’Antonio, a former student of CAST as an assistant.

However, the triumph was for the entire blue team which, in addition to conquering the title of World Champions in the Senior Category, finishing ahead of Sweden and Singapore thanks to Marco Tomasi and Tommaso Bonseri Capitani, also won two second podiums: in the Junior category with the very young Giorgia Ceccato and in the Pastry category, with Antonio Dell’Oro and Luca Bnà.

Great was the satisfaction and emotion of all the technical staff of the Italian National Chefs (NIC): the General Manager Gianluca Tomasi, the Team Manager Pier Luca Ardito and the Junior Team Chef Angelo Biscotti, who together prepared our National team for a among the most important cooking competitions in the world.

In this regard, we recall that Italy was the only one to fly to Abu Dhabi with three teams, proving the importance that FIC, in the role of its President Rocco Pozzulo, attributes to this type of international competitions.

In the competition, Senior Tomasi and Bonseri Capitani had five hours to prepare a four-course menu (one vegan, one meat, one fish and one dessert) with ingredients chosen by the international jury. Junior Ceccato, on the other hand, had to prepare a three-course menu for 4 people in three hours. Finally, Dell’Oro and Bnà had eight hours to prepare a chocolate-based dessert for 12 people to be prepared with different techniques, as well as 12 desserts. Among the evaluation criteria, the jury took into account the taste (which “weighed” half the score), the preparation of the dishes, the cleaning of the kitchen and the sustainability strategies to avoid waste of the food used.

To reach this series of victories, Italy had to prepare very hard and had to overcome numerous difficulties during the two years of training: the date, the venue of the Championships, as well as the type of menu were repeatedly reconsidered to cause of the pandemic emergency.

The blue team also had to replace one of its members, Andrea Del Villano, who was forced to give up due to work problems, with Giorgia Ceccato: a lucky choice, given that, in the Junior category, the young chef took home the silver.

The whole Italian team that trained for two years in the CAST Alimenti classrooms equipped with the most advanced cooking technologies on the market, did so using only the free time they had available. Recall that other countries, such as the Scandinavian ones for example, are subsidized by their respective states for the entire training period and it is no coincidence that so far they have always been the ones to beat, along with the USA and Canada. The members of the blue team, on the other hand, had to take vacation to go to Abu Dhabi and this gives even more honor to the blue triumph.