Jessica Rosval is a chef originally from Montreal, Canada, with nearly 20 years of chefs experience. She is currently the head chef at Massimo Bottura’s Casa Maria Luigia and Al Gatto Verde in Modena, Italy. In addition to her work in the kitchen, Rosval is also the co-founder and culinary director of Roots Modena and the Association for the Integration of Women, which provides culinary training for young migrant women in the region. Known for her dedication and talent, she was named Chef of the Year in 2021 by the L'Espresso guides.
Please introduce yourself to our members
I am Jessica Rosval, I’ve been a chef for almost 20 years and I’m originally from Montreal, Canada. Right now I’m the chef of Casa Maria Luigia in Modena and of the restaurant Al Gatto Verde. I am also the co-founder and culinary director for Roots Modena and for the Association for the integration of women.
Tell us about your current project
Roots Modena is a nonprofit restaurant project that I started in the spring of 2022 with Caroline Caporossi. We founded AIW, the Association for the Integration of Women, in 2020, which is currently a project that is very successfully training migrant women in our community to become chefs. I'm very proud of that. In September 2023, we opened Al Gatto Verde, which is a dream come true here on the property at Casa Maria Luigia and that is where my main focus is this year. New restaurants are like babies—you've got to really be there and give them all the attention and develop their identity within the first months of being open.
Tell us about the restaurant scene in Modena
I find Modena to be a very interesting town of almost opposites. It's a town with such deep history and great tradition, and also a very small town one would say is lost in the center-north of Italy. It's also a small town that is so connected with the entire world. You'll find one territory after another serving incredible, but very traditional food—and that is the identity of Modena. The historical sites and the balsamic vinegar that's been aging for 100-plus years; you have families that have been making the same cotechino sausage recipe and Parmigiano Reggiano for five, six generations; you have all of these very deep-rooted traditions. Then on the other side, you have big companies: you have Osteria Francescana, Ferrari, you have all these amazing things that are super connected with the entire world. It's a hyper-local but also very international place at the same time. I think that's what makes Modena a very interesting place to be nowadays.
What are your three favorite restaurants in Modena and why?
- La Nunziadeina. A place where you can get great grilled meats and sit outside and just enjoy life.
- Trattoria Bianca is our go-to in town. Very traditional as well. Best gnocco fritto that you can get all day every day. Typically gnocco fritto is something you would eat at lunchtime or dinnertime with a glass of lambrusco. But then there's the tradition from back in the day when they used to have maybe some leftover gnocco fritto from the night before they would have at breakfast. That's why we serve our gnocco fritto at Mario Luigia in the morning, for that savory side of breakfast.
- Pain Au Chocolat. Best pastries in Modena are served at the small laboratory called Pain Au Chocolat. It’s by a friend of mine and an ex-colleague from Osteria Franciscana, a French woman named Charlotte. She is in the midst of all the different cafes, sneaking in this really incredible French style pastry place into the city. She's extremely talented. I absolutely love her and Pain au Chocolat.
- Mon Café. Best coffee in town. My favourite coffee is always my mocha that I drink at home but I definitely love Mon Café in the city center. It has a great vibe. It's also really nice to sip coffee right there in the middle of town.
- Market hall - Bar Schiavoni. At the Modena food market there’s a tiny sandwich called Bar Schiavoni. They're making incredible sandwiches, really creative and fun, but also with very locally based ingredients in their sandwiches.
- Also in the market hall, Mama Puglia is making incredible sandwiches with more southern Italian ingredients. There's a very spicy sandwich called Jose, which I always get there that is really good.
”Trattoria Bianca is our go-to in town. Best gnocco fritto that you can get, served all day every day, typically with a glass of lambrusco. ”
What’s a new restaurant or hidden gem in Modena that you think is doing great things?
There's a lot of interesting places that are really looking at the territory from a different perspective. If you go to Franceschetta58, for example, which is our sister bistro, you'll find Francesco Vincenzi as the chef and he's doing this really interesting gardening project as a social inclusion work with the local prison. He's taking these really hyper local, really great fresh ingredients and doing very vegetable forward meals right now. I find that a really interesting project that he's working on, also giving a really fresh and very local approach to a cuisine that is typically so deeply based in meat and pork and lard and cheese. It's really nice to have a vegetable forward local cuisine also coming out.
What’s your favorite kind of restaurant and why?
This is a very difficult question because I can be just as emotionally moved by being at Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo and sitting there having a three Michelin star, finest of the finest French high-end gastronomy service and I can be just as moved by that as I can be by a plate of oven roasted potatoes on the beach in Punta del Este, or by eating a Jamaican patty and drinking a Red stripe beer on the beach in Jamaica. I can be just as emotionally moved by either or but I think when you're having a food experience where you know you'll never have that food anywhere else again that you’re realising you're in a situation of real authenticity. I think it’s also a part of Casa Maria Luigia, we wanted to create a space where you can only eat this here in the middle of the Emilian countryside in this house that is a home. Trying to really create authenticity without saying oh, I know that this sells so I'm gonna put this on my menu, too. It's about creating that moment for that person and I tend to really gravitate towards what is fun and convivial. I want to be able to laugh out loud in a restaurant, I want to be able to say a joke or two with my waiter, I want to feel at ease. I think that's something that is coming back to fine dining, something that we realised a number of years ago that restaurants have become so silent. Everybody was sitting there taking their Instagram photos of their dishes and nobody really wanted to talk too loud and people were afraid to ask too many questions. There was a silence that was blanketing a lot of fine dining restaurants. This is kind of a little rebellion that we're doing as we're bringing conviviality back into fine dining. Because what is the point of sharing love and dishes and whatnot - it's not a silent movie, it should be an interactive experience. What is more interactive than taking what's in front of you and eating it, let's dialogue fine dining and what we do. A big difference between also fine dining with different types of dining is that in tasting menus we create dialogue and narration and we're telling a story. We have this idea. We have a concept. We have this journey that we really want to take somebody on so let's do it in a way that you would actually go on a journey with somebody.
I always want a dinner to be positive and fun and memorable. So for me, it's definitely about creating those spaces that make people feel at ease, having a service that really makes people feel comfortable, having dishes that maybe make people laugh a little bit or spike somebody's curiosity. So many restaurants are serving the same style of food if we just need to eat and we need to fill the act of eating which was to satiate ourselves, but what about the restaurants? What about the experience?
What are your three favorite food cities and your favorite restaurants in those cities?
- Los Angeles – I remember being in LA just recently and on a Thursday night we went to this Thai restaurant called Anajak and they basically set out these makeshift tables in an alleyway and they feed you off paper cups and plates and you eat this really crazy kind of tacos meets Thai food. In an alleyway, hip-hop music blaring, the cooks are all out cooking back in the kitchen. They have probably the most elaborate and refined wine list of Rieslings that I've seen in a long time in any restaurant. The really high-end, interesting and passionate sommelier, pairing these incredible wines with this really fun alley street food. I think it was a really cool authentic LA experience I really enjoyed.
- New York – Going to Dante and just having their cocktails and getting back in the vibes with their live music playing. The original location of Dante, which is in Soho. When you go to there I wish I lived here and this was my neighborhood bar and I would be here every day. I would be that very chic old lady sitting there dressed up with her posse of really young cool-looking friends. That's why I want to be when I grow up.Also whenever we travel to New York, one of the first nights, especially the night that we land we usually make a pit stop at this restaurant, I think there's like maybe three of them now in New York, called Raku and they do really cool authentic Japanese udon. It's incredible quality, great flavors. I really enjoy that.
- Punta del Este – One of my best food memories was probably about five years ago in Uruguay’s Punta del Este. Chef Mauro Colagreco had brought me, Massimo and the team to eat at this restaurant called Marisma. Chef Federico Desseno has built these wood burning ovens on the beach with his bare hands and just made us potatoes, empanadas, roasted vegetables and a lamb leg. Sitting there with your feet in the sand, incredible flavors and just such an authentic experience with his family. That was something that is so inspiring because it is such a dream to have a restaurant like that. The flavors were incredible and he was a big inspiration for us when I showed up on the property here in Casa Maria Luigia and saw that nothing was really built yet, but we had a wood burning oven and I immediately in my mind went to that experience on the beach in Uruguay. Those feelings and those flavors, what if we could do that here, what if somehow I could give somebody even a fraction of that feeling of happiness that I felt eating that food from those wood burning ovens on the beach in Punta del Este in Uruguay? Such a specific situation and I really will always remember that as being such an incredible experience.
What is your favorite dish and where is your favorite restaurant to have it?
This is a difficult question because there are things that can bring me back to very specific moments. In Montreal, let's line up at Schwartz’s smoked meat Deli on Boulevard St-Laurent, get treated poorly by the staff and have a massive smoked meat sandwich the size of my forearm, full of yellow mustard. Basically, that's what Montreal smoked meat is all about and that will take me down memory lane and make me emotional.
But then also theres the dishes that my mother makes. Maybe going up to sugar shacks in Montreal, pouring boiling maple syrup on the snow and rolling it up on a stick is one of the most emotional experiences. Sometimes little pine needles get stuck into it but you eat them anyways, and it doesn't matter because that's a part of the experience. Imagine when you're a kid. That was the best. Roasted marshmallows and anything put over a fire brings you back to days like camping as kids in the forest. The very simple stuff is the most emotional things for me. I like to play a lot of with those childhood flavors and try and also bring them into fine dining contacts and I think that's fun for people as well.
Who is an up-and-coming chef you are keeping an eye on
I think that there are some very very inspiring young entrepreneurial chefs who are starting great projects. In Zurich there’s a girl named Zineb Hattab and she's just opened her third vegan restaurant in town. The first one was called KLE, the second one is Dar and I think now she's working on a third one called COR. I think that it's very brave. We worked together in Francescana and then she went to New York for a while and had this change of heart. She was in fine dining and then she became morally inclined to become vegan and made that switch and started basically doing this great study into vegan cuisine and has launched these three restaurants up in Zurich. I admire her confidence to have done that. It's brave, and she's very successful. She also just published a book and so I'm very proud of her. I really like seeing what she's doing. I think that for new young chefs it's hard to break out, because there’s a lot of big dogs.
Also, a lot of people are talking about a young guy called Michele Lazzarini in Italy. Michele is the chef at Contrada Bricconi. He's doing a beautiful cuisine, very well studied, very Nordic style. I went to eat there recently and I had a really nice time there.'
Who is a food expert whose restaurant recommendations you’d like to see?
I would definitely just look at where I am and look at who I think is the most active promoter of the food from that region. I have the privilege of having traveled for so many years with Massimo Bottura so that has connected me to a nice food network of people that want to show their city when we go to places. I've been very fortunate for that.
