BITE 2026 gathers global chefs for a gala in Italy

BITE 2026 closed two days in Sant'Ilario d'Enza, near Reggio Emilia, with a 250-seat gala dinner built around The Best Chef Awards, pulling chefs from four continents into one Italian dining room on September 16.

The festival ran wider than any single cuisine. Pizza specialists worked ovens alongside pastry chefs, gelato makers and bartenders at Antica Corte Ortalli over September 15 and 16, with equipment brands such as Moretti Forni supplying the hardware for chefs cooking back to back across both days.

The BITE 2026 gala dinner narrowed the focus to a single table. Alvaro Clavijo brought El Chato, his tasting-menu restaurant in Bogotá, to the room; Hans Neuner represented Ocean, his two-Michelin-starred kitchen on Portugal's Algarve coast; Nicolò Rotella cooked from 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Shanghai. Bahraini chef Tala Bashmi and pastry chef Kay Baumgardt filled out a lineup built to look nothing like a single-country showcase.

Pizza ovens and tasting menus, sharing one stage for two days.

Pizza shares the stage with tasting menus

Italian names carried the daytime program: pizzaiolo Ciccio Vitiello, Daniele Del Gaudio and Michelin-starred chef Jacopo Chieppa of Equilibrio worked the two days alongside Francesco Martucci of I Masanielli, one of the country's more decorated pizza ovens. The pairing is deliberate: BITE has built its identity on treating pizza and fine dining as one continuum rather than separate categories.

That framing matters in a country where Napoli on the Road was just named the world's best pizzeria, a reminder that Italy's pizza scene keeps drawing the same critical attention as its tasting-menu rooms.

An industry calendar getting more crowded

BITE lands in a September thick with Italian food awards. TheFork Awards named 48 new restaurants across the country days earlier, and Gault&Millau handed its own top honor to a dining room outside Paris the same month, evidence that the calendar of prizes, festivals and galas keeps expanding faster than any one publication can track.

None of it changes what happens at the stove. Whether the story is a wood-fired oven or a two-star tasting menu, BITE's organizers are betting that putting both under one roof, in front of the same 250 guests, says more about where Italian cooking stands right now than keeping the categories apart ever did.