Italian chef Gabriele Bonci, widely nicknamed the "Michelangelo of pizza," has opened his new restaurant, Bonci at Chef's Society, at City Centre Mirdif in Dubai, bringing his signature Roman-style pizza to the city. His trademark technique is cutting pizza with scissors rather than a knife, a method he says protects the dough's light, airy structure during service: "I needed a tool that would allow us to cut it without ruining that structure during service."
Before pizza, Bonci spent years working in fine dining, until he decided to change direction entirely. "At a certain point I said, 'I want to do something else.' I put myself in the middle of the street and created something different," he recalled, adding that passion eventually fades and only hard work sustains a career over time.
One striking part of his interview is his defence of pineapple on pizza, a perennial point of debate among pizza purists. Bonci says he makes it himself and considers it among his best creations, arguing that pizza has moved far beyond Italy's borders to become what he calls "an ethnic dish" shaped by cultures everywhere it travels.
Sustainable farming is central to his identity as a chef. He says every square centimetre of his pizza dough comes from land cultivated through regenerative agriculture. Bonci described Dubai as a city where something new is designed every day, a quality he believes gives his style of pizza-making fresh room to grow.