About Me

About Renée Restivo

A cooking instructor and expert on authentic Italian regional cuisine, Renée Restivo had the pleasure of sharing recipes from The Silver Spoon cookbook on National TV for the book's launch. Renée leads culinary tours to Sicily, and is passionate about traditions of authentic Italian cooking.
www.soulofsicily.com

Known for her vivacious spirit, sincere enthusiasm and a sense of adventure, she brings Italy to life with stories about recipes from opera-singing fish sellers, shepherds on vespas and thousand-year old olive trees. Students and viewers always want to know where she is and what she’s found next on her culinary adventures in Italy. Her essays appear in National Geographic Traveler and Travelers’ Tales’ books.

Renée moved to Italy in 2001, when she began living her dream as an instructor at the renowned Toscana Saporita Cooking School, located in the middle of 10,000 olive trees at the 500-year-old farm Campo Romano, in the Tuscan province of Lucca. A seasoned instructor, she developed her own lessons on herbs, regional traditions, olive oil, pasta and wines there, and was known as La Siciliana, because she spoke about Sicily’s ingredients and recipes in Tuscany – a sin! In New York, she appeared at The James Beard Foundation and the Italian Culinary Institute with the school.

Over the past seven years, hundreds of groups have participated in Renée’s cooking lessons, “Taste of Sicily” journeys, Sicilian Olive Harvest experiences and programs at Villa del Poeta in Sicily. When she is in the states, she gives hands-on cooking lessons at cooking schools and private homes.

She returns to Agrigento often to visit her family’s farm and the heirloom vineyards of her great-grandfather there. After her Zia Cetta from Agrigento scolded her for not speaking perfect Italiano, she studied Italian while working abroad to become fluent. She has worked for the wine producer Tasca D’Almerita in Sicily.

In the 90s, she took a risk when she left a promising career on Madison Avenue (where she worked on food and travel ads), to pursue an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Narrative Non-Fiction) from The New School. In her spare time, she offered to volunteer at cooking seminars, and soon after, she became a recipe tester and Chef for special events for La Cucina Italiana magazine and the Italian Culinary Institute in New York. Friends reminded her she was becoming a “professional,” before she even realized it.