Agrichef Festival - National Final

An Italian championship of rural cuisine

The Agrichef Festival is the event through which Turismo Verde, the farm-stay association of Cia-Agricoltori Italiani, showcases the cuisine of the Italian countryside every year. Established in 2019, the event is structured as a traveling journey across the regions: following local selections, the winners of the regional stages meet in Rome for the national final, hosted in the kitchens of the IPSSEOA Amerigo Vespucci, located at via Cipriano Facchinetti 42, in the Pietralata district.

The venue is permanent and not by chance: the final takes place inside a hospitality school because the project bridges two worlds that rarely meet at the stove—that of agrichefs (farmers who cook in their own farm-stays using what the farm produces) and that of students training for a career in the restaurant industry.

How the competition works

Each finalist region fields a mixed team: an agrichef from an associated farm-stay paired with two or more students from a local hospitality institute, accompanied by their teacher. The team prepares a signature dish live that must address the year's theme and, above all, reflect the agricultural identity of their region.

• Raw materials: products from the farm and local specialties, often with DOP, IGP, or DOCG certification
• Evaluation: taste quality, technique, creativity, as well as the ability to tell the story of the ingredients and the landscape they come from
• Jury: industry experts, food bloggers, and representatives from institutions and the academic world
• Balance: rural tradition should not be turned into a museum piece, but reinterpreted with restraint

Themes of recent editions

The rules change every year, guiding the work of the teams. In 2025, the central theme was circular dishes: waste recovery, anti-food waste practices, and the sustainability of rural cooking. In 2026, the 8th edition focused on geographical indications, asking contestants to build their dishes around certified excellence—from the Scalogno di Romagna IGP to the Barbera d'Asti DOCG—to highlight the deep bond between quality labels and regional cuisines, in a sector (the Italian DOP economy) that exceeds twenty billion euros per year.

A national event held in Lazio

Although it is a showcase for all Italian regions, the Agrichef Festival calls the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, in Lazio, its home. The choice of the capital is functional to the institutional nature of the event: the awards ceremony takes place in the presence of the national leadership of Cia and Turismo Verde, and the event has become a benchmark for the Italian farm-stay world, which includes thousands of businesses engaged in farm-to-table dining.

For the Roman public and those involved in food and wine, the day is also a rare opportunity to see eight or more different ways of interpreting country cooking in action, side by side: from Emilian stuffed pastas to Venetian lagoon fish, from Piedmontese land-based dishes to Salento soups, and even Calabrian and Ligurian preparations.

Why it deserves attention

The Agrichef Festival is neither a TV contest nor a food festival with tasting booths: it is a supply-chain event designed to add value to those who produce and cook in the same place. Its interest lies precisely here—in showing that Italian farm-stay dining has become a true cultural heritage, and that new generations of chefs can learn it directly from those who cultivate the land.