Giulia Massimiliani: the visionary chef behind Kitchen Wishes

The problem, when you talk with Giulia,
is that she takes you to a thousand fascinating places…
but she never tells you how to get back home.

Let’s just say she doesn’t provide an instruction manual.

With her, you travel without a safety net —
on a kind of multicolored carousel that seems chaotic, but isn’t.
If you need to know the destination before you leave,
if you crave reassurance,
Giulia is probably not the guide for you.

With her, you have to cast off the ropes and set sail.
And yet, her apparent randomness —
that’s the real surprise —
has its own method.

Giulia is the ideologist, chef, and organizer behind Kitchen Wishes.
And lately, she’s also a mom.

Her motto? To welcome.

To welcome whatever comes — always —
with one clear purpose:
to take it, transform it, and give it back.

Receiving as a Creative Act

“Cooking is about receiving an ingredient and transforming it.
I receive a gift only to give it back in another form.
I keep nothing — I can’t wait to release what I’ve created
and see what others will do with it.
My existence depends on others,
in the sense that I need to make things and put them back into circulation —
transformed, but still mine.”

For the Kitchen Wishers, cooking is emotion turned into color and flavor,
into release and creativity.
The only limit is one’s own skill —
but anyone can get there, with time and curiosity.

For Giulia, cooking is music.
A dish has its own sound, its rhythm —
an entire symphony for which she is the conductor,
almost in spite of herself.

When she cooks, she sees sparks of color,
following them like the aromatic trails in Ratatouille.

When the Kitchen Wishes adventure began,
she never imagined she’d end up leading a whole team.
She only wanted to create a beautiful game.

But in the end, many followed her —
and she somehow found herself in command.

About Elena, her co-chef, she says:

“She’s my balance.
When one of us rises, the other grounds her.
That’s why we work — because neither of us feels like the ‘first,’
so both our minds stay open.”

Giulia dreams of creating events that awaken the right neurons,
where people vibrate, lose themselves,
forget what time or day it is —
and simply live the moment.

For her, living in the present is living well:
doing, rather than talking.

And when you ask her where she wants to take Kitchen Wishes,
she just shakes her head, almost annoyed.

“I don’t think about what it will become —
only about being who we are.
Future goals are boring.”