Antonio Carluccio

About Antonio Carluccio

Antonio Carluccio, OBE, (born 1937 in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy) is a London-based Italian chef, restaurateur and food expert.

Carluccio was born in south Italy, but his father was a stationmaster, and he moved with his father's job when he was young and grew up in Piedmont. He moved to Vienna at age 21 to study languages. He lived in Germany from 1962 to 1975, working as wine merchant in Hamburg. He came to the United Kingdom in 1975 to work as a wine merchant, importing Italian wines. He became the manager of Terence Conran's Neal Street Restaurant in Covent Garden in 1981, and became its owner in 1989. He and his wife Priscilla (Conran's younger sister) opened an Italian food shop, named "Carluccio's", in 1991, and a wholesale business in 1994. The first "Carluccio's Caffè" was opened in 1999 and a chain has expanded, initially across southeast England, and subsequently across the UK. After ten years of developing Carluccio’s Caffés, Antonio has now stepped down from being a consultant to concentrate on new projects and ventures.

He has written several books on Italian cuisine and appeared on television in the BBC's Food and Drink Programme, and in his own series Antonio Carluccio's Italian Feasts in 1996. He was given the national honour of Commendatore dell' Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana by the Italian government in 1998 for his contribution to the Italian food industry and in 2007 he was awarded an OBE.