If she had to choose the perfect setting for her food, Alice Gregori would probably say Sunday food feast. Gregori, founder of Caponatina Lab—a catering and private dinner service in Menlo Park—aims to welcome guests into a lively dining room filled with casual tables, loud and fun conversation, and food that’s outspokenly Italian.
Essentially, her goal is to recreate the meals she grew up attending on her family’s farm. Hailing from a small village in Lombardy, Lago d’Idro—which is close enough to the Dolomites to classify her as a foraging, hiking “mountain woman”—Gregori doesn’t come from a formal culinary school background. Instead, she boasts a passion for home-cooked meals.
Gregori still follows many recipes she learned from the women of her house, who were fortunate always to have the freshest, most fragrant ingredients at their fingertips. While her mother took care of a large garden and raised chickens, her father worked as a beekeeper.
Gregori herself graduated college with a degree in Social Studies and was pursuing a career in psychomotricity working with children and their parents in Italy. When her husband’s job was relocated from Northern Italy to Silicon Valley just before the pandemic, she thought it was time to make a change herself.
In Menlo Park, Gregori noticed the area was bustling with innovative chefs and exciting cocktail menus, but the restaurant scene lacked simple, genuine experiences—like an Italian chef showing up on your doorstep with a loaf of homemade bread, ready to whip up a mouthwatering meal using simple, fresh ingredients while regaling you with stories of the cuisine’s country of origin. To top off every meal, Gregori enchants her guests with a fabulous limoncello, which has certainly helped garner so many of her 5-star online reviews.
Manzo All'Olio from Caponatina Lab. Credit: Sara Ghedina
In her own pantry, Gregori always keeps a few staples on hand: olio buono (good quality oil), white wine, a big chunk of Pecorino, lots of seasonal veggies, and fresh herbs right from her backyard. When she moved to California less than a year ago, she immediately fell in love with local farmers’ markets: “So far, the spring selections have been my favorite: fava beans, fresh pies, onions, artichokes, and these beautiful Meyer lemons,” she explains while rolling out fresh pasta dough for Paglia e Fieno Tagliatelle.
Gregori started Caponatina Lab with the intention of offering nothing more than an authentic experience, mixing Italian staples with regional recipes from her home—and that’s what she’s still doing today. Take polenta, for example. She uses this key Italian ingredient to make Amor Polenta, a dreamy, soft, fragrant cake—and she also serves it as a side for Manzo All’Olio, a big piece of beef chuck prepared in olive oil, a recipe coming from the Cucina Povera tradition. “When cooking for a group of people, my ultimate goal is to transport them to Italy in one night,” she says. “The area I’m from is a little off the radar for tourists, so I love to infuse some knowledge about my hometown into every event. As ‘mountain people,’ we have a very special way of welcoming outsiders into our homes, and I’m proud to be sharing that same spirit of hospitality with Californians.”