Sardinian Chef Gianluca Deiana Expands New York Cooking Classes into Italian Culture Venture

The chef behind ZAFFERANO & CO. is linking hands-on culinary experiences with an Italian guide, a producer marketplace and regional publishing.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Gianluca Deiana is building ZAFFERANO & CO. around New York culinary classes and a wider Italian culture platform.
• The Manhattan Italian Cook-Off combines hands-on pasta making with team competitions at Via Toscana in Hell's Kitchen.
• The venture also promotes an Italian establishment guide, an artisan marketplace and Born Italian editorial publishing.
• Deiana says he has taught more than 8,000 students; the company's larger platform and audience figures remain its own estimates.

For Sardinian-born Chef Gianluca Deiana, teaching New Yorkers to make pasta by hand has become the starting point for a broader venture in Italian food and culture. After a restaurant career spanning London and New York, he is bringing cooking classes, food discovery, regional storytelling and direct access to Italian producers under ZAFFERANO & CO., a business intended to connect American customers with the people and traditions behind Italian products.

Deiana says he has taught more than 8,000 students in New York. Some of them call him “the GOAT” — the Greatest of All Time — a nickname he says he initially mistook for a joke about the animal. His latest venture gives that personal following a business purpose: converting interest in the recipes learned during a class into sustained engagement with restaurants, artisans and regional Italian culture.

From Sardinian family kitchens to a New York classroom

Deiana’s relationship with food began in Sardinia, where his grandfather ran a distribution business, a supermarket and the family’s Albergo Italia hotel. The household’s circumstances changed sharply after his grandfather died. Deiana recalls that financial hardship and the practical need to feed himself pushed him into cooking as a teenager. His earliest education, however, also came from making food alongside his grandmother and from the family traditions he continues to associate with hospitality.

He studied at a hotel school in Arzachena under chef Antonello Frasconi and supported his training through restaurant and hotel work. At 16 he moved to London, beginning at Spaghetti House and later working at Bertorelli under André de Megève and in the kitchens of Carluccio’s, Orso, San Lorenzo and Timo. His account of those years includes work as a private chef and meals prepared for prominent guests, among them Luciano Pavarotti and Jack Nicholson.

Deiana moved to New York in 1999, where he says he established three restaurants and cooked for a clientele that included public figures and business leaders. His hospitality interests also extended back to Sardinia: he says he acquired the Feudi della Medusa resort and winery in Santa Margherita di Pula in 2020. These experiences inform a venture that treats Italian food not just as a restaurant menu but as a way to discover places, makers and stories.

Cooking lessons with a competitive twist

The most immediate experience for visitors is the Italian Cook-Off, staged at Via Toscana, 344 West 52nd Street in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood. Participants learn techniques for preparing fresh pasta and classic Italian sauces before splitting into teams and presenting their work to judges. Each team selects a judge, while Deiana makes the final assessment. The organisers advertise prizes worth up to $2,000 for selected competitions, rather than a guaranteed award for every class.

The programme described by ZAFFERANO & CO. includes pesto-focused competitions on Thursdays and carbonara experiences on Sundays, alongside hands-on classes designed for couples, groups of friends and corporate teams. The premise is straightforward: guests do not simply watch a demonstration; they prepare their food, share a meal and take part in a social experience. For destination visitors, that makes the class an activity rooted in a particular culinary tradition rather than conventional restaurant dining.

Deiana also sees the format as a team-building product. The organisers say private Cook-Off bookings have included Quantiphi and Amazon Web Services. That corporate dimension sits alongside the tourist-facing programme and offers a second audience for the same combination of instruction, competition and shared dining.

A guide, a marketplace and an Italian magazine

The cooking sessions are one part of a larger platform. ZAFFERANO & CO.’s Italian Guide is presented as a directory of restaurants and other Italian places in the United States and Italy, including the ability to search by dish. The company says its database contains more than 365,000 listings. It describes the guide as a discovery tool where businesses can claim their existing pages, although that listing total has not been independently audited.

Alongside the guide is an online marketplace intended to connect Italian producers and artisans directly with American customers. Its scope extends beyond ingredients to fashion, design, household goods, beauty and craftsmanship. According to the company, participating sellers can receive assistance with US requirements, product listings and fulfilment, including small producers seeking an overseas customer base without opening their own American storefront.

Editorial publishing forms the third strand. Born Italian is presented on the company’s website as a region-by-region digital magazine, covering chefs, local restaurants, recipes and cultural traditions. Deiana’s supplied account also puts the wider editorial library at more than 3,000 articles and recipes. The combination is designed to lead readers from a story about an Italian dish or region to related cooking experiences, establishments and products.

That model is relevant to two sides of the travel economy. For visitors, a cooking session or dish-specific guide can provide an accessible introduction to regional food culture. For smaller Italian operators, the planned connections between publishing, discovery and sales could offer additional visibility in the US market. The extent of that commercial benefit will depend on the platform’s continuing reach and on participation by producers and businesses.

A personal ambition behind a wider enterprise

Deiana describes the project in the context of an unusually difficult recent period. Following complications from surgery, he says he lived with persistent pain for two years and underwent three operations. He attributes his determination to keep rebuilding to the example of his family and to his son. The goal he now expresses is to create an international business with the reach that his grandfather’s food enterprise once had in Sardinia.

His story is grounded in a recognisable hospitality lesson: food businesses can be built around more than the transaction at the table. At ZAFFERANO & CO., the meal is a point of entry to education, travel inspiration, regional identity and an online marketplace. Whether all of those parts grow as intended remains to be seen, but the venture offers a distinctive example of how a chef’s classroom in New York can become a platform for presenting Italian culture to a much wider audience.