Peppe Zullo

Peppe Zullo

the farmer chef

From Orsara di Puglia to the Milan EXPO, passing through America. A round trip with a luggage made of food and happiness.

Food and happiness

philosophy

"From the garden to the table" is not just a message, It is an idea that Peppe Zullo’s Farm concretely applies through traceable, transparent production processes, oriented towards a single objective: quality, i.e. enhancement of products that are able to mix taste, health and authenticity.

Who is Peppe Zullo?

According to Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, he is a "Farmer Chef who has been able to give back to his land Its deserved pride". For Oscar Farinetti, creator of Eataly, Peppe Zullo is one of the best ambassadors of Apulian excellence in the world. There are many witnesses to the route undertaken in the last 30 years by this extraordinary Italian cuisine wizard. The study and care on quality and traceability of raw material, the rediscovery of the most authentic values of the Mediterranean tradition and food as an element of happiness, together, are the main road on which Peppe Zullo continues to produce dreams and reality in the sign of taste. Peppe Zullo's farm, his restaurant and reception halls, wine cellar and cooking school are the most appetizing and ripe fruits of a constantly evolving history.

You wanna be Americano

You were born in Italy

Peppe Zullo was born in Orsara, on those gentle hills close to the Apennine chain that look towards the endless Tavoliere. A totally green Puglia, made up of stone villages yet to be discovered. Here, aside from studying, he also helps his family that owns the only gas pump and guesthouse in the village, which was often the only possibility of refreshment for travelers and off-site workers.

In the 70's he emigrated to North America, looking for work and luck in the restaurant business and in 1978 he finally opened his first restaurant in Boston. He learned how to cook from his mother, his cuisine was very poor and clashed with the overseas Fast Food madness. It was at this point, in the mid-1980s, that he decided to go back to Italy and find a new way to feed the world, looking for rediscovering the slow rhythms of the seasons and the spontaneous herbs in addition to the cyclical nature of the vegetable garden and the vine.

imagedrops
imagedrops
imagedrops

The Farm

Everything is eco-friendly

The Farm total area is 180,000 square meters. A large, green and harmonious estate with 22,000 square meters of the vegetable garden, 35,000 square meters of the vineyard, 20,000 square meters of woods where fruit trees, mushrooms, wild and officinal herbs can be found. The Farm is completed by the facilities dedicated to animal breeding, the Dairy Farm, the small resorts and the headquarters of the International Cooking School. The Restaurant in the garden was opened in 2012 and was added to the existing one, built 20 years before. The quality of the products grown, selected and prepared by the Farm moves daily "from the land to the table", from the producer to the customer who can test excellence, taste and uniqueness.

The Landscape Factory

Awarded by Unesco

The Farm is one of only 20 in Italy, located in 12 regions, that have obtained the special Award “La Fabbrica del Paesaggio” (Landscape Factory), organized by the Italian Federation of Unesco Clubs and Centers (FICLU). This is the motivation for the Award given to Peppe Zullo: “For having admirably built, with Villa Jamele, a company with a very low environmental impact, without ever neglecting the objective of proposing a diet based on authenticity with zero-mile gastronomic chain products”.

A close-knit team

Peppe has a large family, those who work with him have been doing It for dozens of years, in some cases for more than twenty, because even before you have a job, you have to fall in love with his philosophy, his ideal that doesn't involve waste or heavy impacts on the territory. In every aspect of Peppe Zullo's cooking there is a piece of each of them, the same people you could meet and learn the name of. You will hopefully meet them again whenever you want to come back and to which you can ask the secrets hidden in the kitchens of a more than thirty years long story, a story that each of them has contributed to writing with their own commitment, ideas, abilities and intuitions.