Alessio Sebastiani

Alessio Sebastiani is the hand guiding the kitchen at Cactus Milano. His path includes international experiences, but what arrives on the plate is not a cuisine built to feel distant. It is a cuisine with technique, yes, but also instinct, color, and a certain freedom. Alessio works with vegetables and the sea without treating them as two separate worlds: he uses them as living matter, to be listened to, cut, cooked, transformed, but never covered. At Cactus Milano, his work is recognizable exactly there, in an idea of taste that stays clean but never flat, contemporary but still easy to understand.

For Alessio, green is not just an aesthetic choice. It is a way of thinking about cooking, starting from the season and understanding what an ingredient can become when treated with respect. Vegetables, herbs, sprouts, fish, different textures, and precise contrasts enter his dishes with a clear role. There is no desire to create a cold or punishing “healthy” cuisine. The idea is the opposite: to show that thoughtful, light, and sustainable cooking can be intense, generous, and full of flavor.

The Cactus Garden is probably the dish that best tells the story of Alessio Sebastiani. Fifteen types of seasonal vegetables, prepared with different cooking methods and textures, become a kind of edible landscape. It is not a simple line-up of vegetables, but a precise construction: something stays crisp, something becomes soft, something brings sweetness, acidity, aroma, and freshness. It is a dish that only seems simple if you look at it quickly. In reality, it contains his way of cooking: taking vegetables seriously and making them the protagonist without making them heavy or artificial.

In Alessio’s dishes, there is always a balance between control and play. You can see it in the zucchini flowers, in the upside-down seafood fregola, in the eggplant parmigiana, but also in the dishes most closely tied to the season. His cuisine does not try to be perfect in a cold sense. It tries to be alive. Every dish needs to have a reason, a texture that stays in the mouth, a color that identifies it, and a flavor that does not disappear immediately. This is what makes his hand recognizable at Cactus Milano: a green, marine, instinctive, and precise cuisine, where technique always serves one purpose, making you want the next bite.