Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the Ferrari sports car brand and Formula 1 racing team, was a disciplined man who liked his routines. The former race car driver turned Italian industrialist rarely left his home region of Emilia-Romagna. Most days you could set your watch by his arrival for lunch at Ristorante Cavallino, a modest company-owned trattoria across from the Ferrari factory in Maranello, named for the prancing horse logo on the cars he produced.
From the 1950s until his death in 1988, Enzo held court at the restaurant in his private room, hosting business banquets and post-race debriefings with his Formula 1 drivers. Hollywood stars, heads of state and other VIPs who were in town to collect their new cars would also stop in for a meal with Il Commendatore, as Enzo was known by his Formula 1 Scuderia racing team.
A bottle of local Lambrusco was always on ice.
For my father, every meeting, with any person…would end with lunch or dinner at Cavallino,” says Enzo’s son, Piero, who began working alongside his father around 1965 and is now vice chairman at Ferrari.
After Enzo’s death, the restaurant remained a pilgrimage site for Ferrari fanatics, serving its simple regional cooking—tortellini, lasagna, zampone—among an overabundance of signed helmets, driver headshots and other Formula 1 keepsakes. It shut down in late 2019.
This summer, Cavallino reopens as a destination for contemporary design and gastronomy. Its once cluttered dining rooms have been reimagined by Parisian architect and designer India Mahdavi, its menu remastered by Emilia-Romagna’s best-known avant-garde chef, Massimo Bottura, of the three-Michelin-starred Osteria Francescana in neighboring Modena. “It’s an encounter between Enzo Ferrari and Massimo Bottura…two institutions meeting in the Cavallino space,” says Mahdavi of her design, which mixes the retro and modern with a pixelated prancing horse logo as a recurring motif on wallpaper and Bisazza glass tile and vintage Ferrari Yearbook covers blown up into dining room art.Bottura, the company’s new culinary collaborator, has ties to Ferrari going back to the mid-’90s, when Enzo’s granddaughter, Antonella, became a regular at Osteria Francescana. When her son, Enzo Mattioli Ferrari, was 7 or 8 years old, Bottura created a special tortellini dish for him, replacing cream with water in the sauce to accommodate his dietary restrictions. “We became very close friends,” says Bottura, of the Ferrari family. Mattioli Ferrari, now a business development and special projects executive at Ferrari, is working closely with Bottura on the Cavallino project.
After Neri’s daughters took over the restaurant, and with the family’s contract expiring, Ferrari began to consider a new direction for Cavallino as part of a broad new push to expand the reach of the brand. In 2019 they brought in Iannone to develop apparel and Bottura as a new restaurant partner. Mahdavi, who had been working on a home design project for Ferrari’s executive chairman, John Elkann, signed on to reimagine the trattoria space.
Ferrari Brings Back Its Legendary Trattoria With Chef Massimo Bottura
The Italian car company opens Cavallino, a reimagining of the iconic restaurant in Emilia-Romagna by chef Massimo Bottura and designer India Mahdavi.
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