Leadership in hospitality is talked about constantly and practiced inconsistently. Most of the advice available on the subject comes from business schools or management consultancies. Very little of it comes from the actual experience of running a restaurant kitchen when service is in full swing and three things have gone wrong simultaneously. Luca Di Michele’s leadership education came from the latter.
Key Takeaways
- Italian hospitality culture treats the team as the product as much as the food. Leadership that doesn’t understand this produces technically correct but humanly flat dining experiences.
- The American restaurant workforce operates with different expectations and pressures from the Italian one. Effective leadership requires adapting the underlying values without abandoning them.
- The teams that deliver consistently over time are built on clarity, fairness, and genuine investment in people, not on systems alone.
There’s something specific about the way hospitality is understood in Italy. And that doesn’t translate automatically when you move the model to a different country. The food and recipes translate. The expectation that a guest should feel genuinely welcomed, not just efficiently served, translates as well. But the team culture producing that welcome is considerably harder to relocate.
Luca Di Michele grew up in Rome, spent his early professional years at La Sapienza University studying law, and arrived in New York in 2021 with a clear sense of what good hospitality felt like from the guest’s side. What he had to build from scratch was an understanding of how to create that feeling from the team’s side, in an American context, and with an American workforce.
What Italian Hospitality Culture Actually Looks Like Internally
From the outside, Italian hospitality looks like warmth and ease. But from the inside, it’s a set of shared values about what the work is for.
In a well-run Italian restaurant, the team generally understands that the guest’s experience is the point, not the cover count or the throughput. This produces a different relationship to the work. A waiter who genuinely wants the guest to have a good time makes different micro-decisions throughout a service than one who’s optimizing for efficiency.
The kitchen and the floor work as collaborators rather than separate departments in competition for management’s attention. There’s a shared understanding that the dining room and the kitchen are telling the same story, and that if either side fails, the whole thing fails.
Luca Di Michele absorbed all of this growing up. He did it in the way that background knowledge gets absorbed rather than formally taught. He didn’t have a framework for it when he arrived at Numero 28 in 2021. He just knew what it felt like when it was working and when it wasn’t.
The American Context Is Different
The US restaurant industry operates under different structural pressures from the Italian one. Staff turnover is significantly higher. The workforce is more transient. People move between restaurants, cities, and industries in ways that are less common in Italy. Building a stable team that carries institutional knowledge is harder to do and requires more active effort to maintain.
The expectations of staff are also different. American restaurant workers are accustomed to a more transactional employment relationship in many establishments. Leadership that expects loyalty and investment without offering them in return tends to produce exactly the turnover it creates.
Luca Di Michele has spoken about the adjustment this required. The Italian hospitality model that he understood intuitively depended on a level of stability and shared culture that doesn’t automatically exist in the US context. You can’t assume it. You have to build it.
Building it means being explicit about what the culture is rather than assuming people will absorb it. It means investing in people’s development rather than replacing them when things go wrong. It means being consistent, because teams follow what leaders do consistently rather than what they say occasionally.
What He’s Applied at Rosaluna
At Rosaluna Ristorante in Miami, the team culture Luca has worked to create reflects the Italian model adapted rather than transplanted. The underlying values are the same. The way they’re communicated and maintained is shaped by the reality of the Miami hospitality market.
A few things have remained non-negotiable from day one.
The kitchen and the floor communicate — not at the end of service, when problems are already embedded, but during service, when something can still be done about them. This requires deliberate structure and consistent reinforcement. It doesn’t happen by itself.
Staff are treated as people whose experience of the work matters. This sounds like a low bar. But it is a major differentiator in the restaurant industry. People who feel like their contribution is valued and their perspective is considered stay longer and care more than people who feel interchangeable.
Standards are applied consistently. The food that goes out on a quiet Tuesday lunchtime should be the same as the food that goes out on a Saturday evening at full capacity. Achieving this consistently is an operational challenge that never fully resolves. Accepting it as a challenge worth taking seriously is a leadership choice.
Two years into Rosaluna’s life in Miami, these values are embedded in how the restaurant operates. That doesn’t happen without deliberate leadership. And that leadership doesn’t exist without the cultural foundation Luca Di Michele brought from Rome and adapted into something that works here, over five years of American hospitality.
