Alessandro Caporale
Five openings, from empty shell to first service
Every venue below was taken from an empty room to a working operation: equipment and fit-out, menu and price list, food and labour cost, recruitment, training, service standards — then run afterwards, which is the part that tells you whether the opening was done properly. Four of the five were opened with my own capital.
and operated
in total
restaurants
Italy and Egypt
2025 — 2026
Terrazza Italia
Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt · Italian restaurant, international ownership
- Opened from zero
- Pre-opening mandate
- Delivered on schedule
An Italian restaurant built for owners who were not restaurateurs, in a market where almost nothing about the Italian supply chain can be taken for granted. Kitchen equipment, furniture and dining room fit-out selected from scratch; menu and price list written against what could actually be sourced locally, not against what would have worked in Milan.
Delivered: the full team recruited and trained, kitchen and front-of-house workflow defined, service standards set, and the venue handed over to steady-state operation with written procedures. It is still open today under different management.
2019 — 2023
Bellavista
Ripamonti Residence & Hotel — Pieve Emanuele, Milan · F&B concession
- 916 hotel units
- 600+ covers
- Restaurant, pizzeria, bar
- Banqueting and conferences
The whole food and beverage operation of a hotel property that describes itself as the largest in Italy. Breakfast, lunch and dinner for house guests and external diners at the same time, buffet and à la carte across every daypart, with conferences, conventions and private events running alongside continuous restaurant service.
Delivered: a multicultural kitchen and front-of-house brigade built and trained to hold one standard across three very different formats and two very different kinds of guest, at volumes where a bad service cannot be recovered later in the evening.
2017 — 2025
Antica Posta
Corsico, Milan · Italian restaurant, owner-operator
- 300 covers indoors
- 150 in the garden
- €1.3M annual revenue
- Teams up to 40
A former coaching inn converted into a restaurant and built from launch into the reference Italian dining destination for its area. Complete responsibility for the P&L throughout: menu development, supplier negotiation, cost control, pricing, positioning and guest experience — with margins held through inflation, supply disruption and the post-pandemic years.
Delivered: €1.3M in annual revenue in the final year of ownership, from a building that had never been a restaurant.
2017 — 2025
Acquaseltz
Basiglio, Milan · Lakeside restaurant and lounge bar, owner-operator
- 70 covers indoors
- 180 in the garden
- Two service identities
- Opened from zero
A restaurant and a late lounge bar on the same lake, sharing one kitchen and one P&L — two operations with different rhythms, different margins and different staff profiles, which is the hardest kind of venue to price correctly and the easiest to lose money on.
Delivered: a dining service and a bar service that fed each other instead of competing, with a garden that carried the season.
2008 — 2013
Laghetto Santa Maria
Buccinasco, Milan · Lakeside day club
- 250-cover restaurant and pizzeria
- Pool bar, light food all day
- Latin American venue at night
- Watersports and club nights
A lake outside Milan run as one business. A restaurant and pizzeria seating two hundred and fifty, a pool bar serving cold plates and sandwiches through the afternoon, canoes on the water, and after dark the same site became a Latin American venue with a club-night programme. Four trading identities, one team, one P&L, inside a single trading day.
It is also the closest thing in my background to the beach-club and pool-club format that defines a large part of this market: an outdoor operation where demand follows the weather, where food and beverage travel a long way from the kitchen, and where the venue changes identity between lunch and midnight.
Delivered: an operation where the pool, the dining room, the night programme and the events calendar shared the same kitchen, the same staff and the same margin, without any one of them damaging the others.
Figures are the venues' own: covers as laid, and revenue as reported in the final year of ownership. Photographs are of the venues as operated. Bellavista and Antica Posta are still trading under different ownership, and Terrazza Italia under different management.