It’s not often you find a nuclear engineer and an MBA graduate running a restaurant. But the unique talents and interests that Filippo Fiori and Davide Macchi bring to Dué Cucina Italiana are what set this Capitol Hill eatery apart.
At Dué Cucina, the pasta, made fresh daily, is available in four different ways: classic, with or without eggs; gluten-free; and a version that packs in more protein and fiber but has a lower glycemic index. Customers select the sauce they want and pair it with the pasta of their choice. Recent offerings included campanelle, rigatoni, casarecce, spaghetti, and egg-dough fettuccine, paired with smoked salmon, mushroom and white truffle oil, kale pesto or a traditional Bolognese ragù, to name a few.
Fiori and Macchi have been friends since their school days in Tuscany when they rode the bus together. “I grew up in Lari, in Pisa Province, a small farming community where everyone knows everyone,” said Fiori. “My grandfather on my father’s side sold fruits and vegetables in Florence, and also raised pigs. My grandmother on my mother’s side had a big vegetable garden. I was always around food.”
Fiori’s parents wanted him to go to college and gave him a choice of three degree paths: engineer, doctor or lawyer. “I went to the University of Pisa where I was fascinated by physics, but I knew there were not a lot of jobs in that field,” he said. “So I opted for nuclear engineering.”
After college and a stint in Canada, Fiori traveled the world consulting and then began a Ph.D. program in nuclear engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. But an interest in food was always present. During his four years in China, he worked as a waiter, taught bread-baking classes, and was part of a video broadcast series showcasing cooks from different countries.
“I had always cooked at home but it was self-learned,” he said. “In China, I got more serious about it, studying the science of cooking. One of my favorite books is On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. It was compelling reading for me.”
Although Macchi was as much a globe-trotter as Fiori, his career path focused on business and the tech sector. He studied media, economics and business administration at the University of Bologna and then attended the University of California at Berkeley. He also worked as a consultant in Italy, Australia and the US, before earning an MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Mass.
The friends had talked off and on about going into business together but the decision was kick-started by Fiori’s cancer diagnosis in 2015. He contacted Macchi and suggested they start a restaurant together. “In the back of my mind, I was thinking: I might not even get to 40 years old,” Fiori recalled. “I told Davide: I want to do it. Let’s follow our passion. We’re not here forever.”
At the time, Fiori was in China and Macchi in Boston. The two began to research a handful of cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, scoring them in terms of income level, age, lifestyle, affordability, how many Italian restaurants existed, and how well-traveled were the residents.
Seattle came out on top, and Macchi visited in 2015. “I saw Seattle as a city with a healthy lifestyle, surrounded by beautiful nature,” he said. “It was a place where I could raise a family. It just felt right.”
The partners’ different skill sets came in handy as they set up the restaurant. “Filippo is an engineer and loves the creative part of the kitchen,” said Macchi. “He likes developing and personalizing the recipes. I have experience in branding, marketing and media outreach, so I took on more of the management piece.”
Their first restaurant was called Dueminuti, a casual pasta eatery on Seattle’s Capitol Hill that opened in 2016. The name, which means two minutes (inspired by the time it takes to cook fresh pasta), served as a kind of experimental lab. “We wanted to try the food business, but we didn’t want to invest a lot of money in the physical space,” said Macchi. “We wanted to keep it simple.” To help pay the bills, Macchi worked part-time at Amazon for the first two years.
Around this time, Fiori’s father was diagnosed with a gluten intolerance, which spurred Fiori to research pasta that his father could enjoy and still taste delicious. He approached the project like the scientist he is, examining dozens of grains and flavor-testing batch after batch. He used his parents and a few friends as guinea pigs, asking them to rate different batches of pasta for taste, consistency, texture and color.
At the end of 2018, the duo took what they had learned at Dueminuti and reopened as Dué Cucina. They pride themselves on fresh, locally sourced, and high-quality ingredients, such as organic meats, sustainably caught salmon, and five different kinds of pecorino cheese. Prices are in the $10-$12 range.
For Fiori, cooking is both a creative act and a science in terms of engineering a recipe. “But when we make our sauces, we tell our kitchen team, Taste, taste, taste,” he said. “We encourage our cooks to offer everyone a bite and see what they think.”
After three years in Seattle, the friends have settled into their new lives. Macchi and his Wisconsin-born wife are expecting their first child next year; Fiori is married with a 2 ½-year old girl. “Luckily, my little girl loves pasta,” he said.
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