Top chefs in Iglesias for FUN_GO 2026: Cracco, Mainardi, Bondì, and Gambacorta

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Andrea Mainardi is the energy of the stage. The title of his book, " How Much Butter?", is enough to understand his personality, along with the generous recipes that have made him a popular face on social media. Behind the showman, however, lies a first-rate education. Born in Bergamo in 1983, after attending hotel management school in San Pellegrino Terme, he joined Gualtiero Marchesi's team at L'Albereta in Erbusco, where he worked for three years under the guidance of Andrea Berton. In 2010, he took a gamble at Officina Cucina in Brescia: a restaurant that became known for its single table. Then came television, with " La prova del cuoco" alongside Antonella Clerici and " Ci pensa Mainardi" on Fox Life. On the FUN_GO stage, he will bring what sets him apart: his immediate storytelling and ability to engage the audience.

For Ruben Bondì , born in Rome in 1997, everything changed on a balcony. During lockdown, he began cooking outdoors with a camping stove, filming himself on his phone. Those videos spawned programs on Food Network, such as " Cooking on the Balcony with Ruben," " Cooking at the Market with Ruben," and " Cooking by the Sea with Ruben," and books like " Cooking with Ruben" and " Come on, it's ready!". But before the balcony, he already had a profession. As a boy, he dreamed of drawing and poetry; at fifteen, he introduced himself to the chef who worked downstairs to learn the trade. Then came hotel management school, an internship at the Michelin-starred restaurant Il Pagliaccio, a stint in London at The Ned, and years as a private chef in Rome and Milan. His cuisine speaks the language of Roman and Roman-Jewish traditions and is committed to sustainability: his commitment to combating food waste has even earned him a role with the FAO. And it is precisely the recovery and valorization of ingredients that he will be speaking about in Iglesias.

The quartet is rounded out by Francesca Gambacorta , known online as Frafoodlove. Her story begins on a stool: as a child, she climbed onto it to see what was being prepared for dinner, as she recounts in her book " Complex Simplicity. Gourmet for Everyone." In those pages, she doesn't even hide the moments when she doubted her dream, and accompanies her story with fifty recipes. Today, she is a personal chef and creative cuisine teacher, with over 700,000 followers on Instagram, and in 2021, Forbes Italia listed her among the twenty most followed food influencers in the country. Her method has a clear goal: to explain techniques and steps to make chef cuisine accessible. Last February, she led an Italian cooking residency at a resort in the Maldives. At FUN_GO, meanwhile, the flavors of the Iglesiente region await her.