EXTRAVIRGIN OLIVE OIL

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A TABLE IN THE WOODS - THREE NIGHTS - ONE TABLE

The Chef No Florence Guide Will Have Told You About

He’s Never Cooked in Italy. Until Now. One Weekend Only.

On the last weekend of May, a table will be set in the woods of Percussina.

Chef Robbie Felice chose to start here,

not in a restaurant, not in a city pop-up,

but in a place that was built, like his cooking, by someone who simply followed what they loved.

Italian heart. Japanese soul.

Tastes like a memory you never had.

Felice is a James Beard-nominated Rising Star chef. He has appeared on the TODAY show, Good Morning America, the Drew Barrymore Show, CBS and Fox, and been featured across Forbes, Eater, Saveur, the New York Post and Haute Living. The chef and owner of four restaurants, three of them Italian, the fourth something that had never quite existed before.

He calls it pastaRAMEN, and the cuisine is Wafu Italian. Cacio e pepe inside a deep-fried Japanese dumpling. Shrimp scampi finished with ponzu and sake served with temomi ramen. Food that sits in a category entirely its own, nostalgic and new at the same time. He has cooked it on the rooftop of the Faena Hotel in Miami, at Art Basel, in a Soho hair salon. He wanted to do something different. He did.

He trained at the Culinary Institute of America, worked at Babbo, The Modern and B&B Ristorante, and staged at Michelin-starred kitchens in Europe before developing a cuisine that belongs nowhere and everywhere at once.

The evening opens with the PiaGroni, the farm’s own take on a Negroni, served standing among the trees alongside the first appetizers. From there, four courses of Wafu Italian cooking, with La Pia’s olive oils and farm produce woven through each dish, paired with the four wines of the estate. A dinner that could only exist in this place, on this land, at this table. Some evenings are made to be remembered.

Il Bosco de’ La Pia. A Place to Disappear Into.

Hidden paths carved into the woods of Percussina, built as an escape from the worries of the world. At the heart of it all, a princess imprisoned behind iron bars. La Pia dei Tolomei, the tragic noblewoman of Dante’s Purgatorio, who asked only to be remembered. Someone listened. Giacomo Pimpinelli, grandfather of Piero Calamandrei, the great Florentine jurist who helped write Italy’s post-war constitution, built a secret world here in her honor. These woods have been quiet. They are waking up again.

For years, Marta Santoro and her husband drove past the same gate every Sunday morning on their way for fresh schiacciata. Over time they began to wonder about the stone house behind it and the stories it might tell. What followed was years of patient restoration, four walls in Chianti carefully brought back to life.

Today La Pia is a working farm, its land tended with the same quiet intention Pimpinelli brought to these woods. A place born from a private dream, now ready for new ones.

This May, a chef who has spent his life following what he loves comes to set his table here.