Hi everyone my name is Luca Romano, Luca is a woman’s name where I come from and I’m a 42-year-old chef living in New York City. Born and raised in Bologna, Italy, I now call a cozy apartment in Brooklyn home, where my kitchen windows fog up with steam from Sunday sauce and the hum of city life never quite fades. But somehow, in the chaos, I’ve found the rhythm to cook, to share, to belong.

I grew up above my grandmother’s trattoria, where life happened in the kitchen. She didn’t speak much English, but she spoke pasta, she spoke risotto, she spoke love with every dish she put on the table. I was her little shadow knees always dusted with flour, fingers always stealing spoonfuls of ragù when I thought she wasn’t looking. She saw everything, of course. She let me mess up. She let me learn.

Back then, I didn’t think I’d become a chef. I tried a lot of things. I worked odd jobs, traveled, even sold scarves in Florence for a year. But I always circled back to food. It was the only place I felt completely myself messy, passionate, a little stubborn, and wildly in love with flavor.

When I moved to the U.S. in my late twenties, I didn’t come with a plan. Just two suitcases, a cast iron pan, and my grandmother’s handwritten recipes tucked between my passport pages. I started small catering gigs, prep work, helping at farmers’ markets. I chopped mountains of onions and cried through all of them, for different reasons. Eventually, I found my footing, cooking in restaurants around the city and later teaching Italian cooking classes from my apartment.

These days, I focus on sharing real Italian home cooking with fellow food lovers—not the textbook kind, but the kind that’s flexible, imperfect, and bursting with heart. My classes are a little chaotic and a lot of fun, with wine in hand and music in the background. I teach how to feel the dough, not just follow the recipe. I love showing that food doesn’t have to be complicated to be magical.

If you’re a home cook, welcome. You’re my favorite kind of person. You don’t need fancy knives or a perfect kitchen just curiosity, a wooden spoon, and maybe a good olive oil. I’ll show you the rest.

My food is still deeply Italian, but it’s got a little New York spice now. Just like me.

So if you ever smell garlic and rosemary drifting out of a Brooklyn window, it might be me come say hi. I always make enough for one more.