Marco Barbieri

I just had no more life for it. It was too stressful.

The shorter course that became the longer life #

Barbieri grew up in a small village near Milan. At the end of school, he enrolled in computer programming. It was a five-year course. Cooking school was two. He chose cooking because it was shorter. That is the whole story of the decision, and he has never bothered to embellish it. The romance of vocation arrived later, through the work itself, not through a moment of clarity at the age of sixteen.

The decade that followed was a decade of other people’s kitchens. Barbieri worked through an international agency that rotated him across four continents — New York, Switzerland, Germany, a spell back in Italy, Venezuela, eventually Singapore. Each posting was a contract, not a career. He learned to read a foreign kitchen within days: who was competent, who was a liability, which local suppliers were honest, which would cut their losses the moment something went wrong. He also learned when a place was not his. By the time the agency sent him to Shanghai in January 1995, he had rehearsed independence a dozen times without naming it.

A grandmother, an airport, a city that would not let him leave #

The Pasta Fresca contract was supposed to last a few months. He arrived, dropped a cigarette on the ground outside the airport, and got his first lesson in Shanghai from a woman who made clear this was not a place where you discarded things casually. He laughs about it now. The city, in its directness, had already told him what it expected.

He moved to the Equatorial Hotel kitchen in 1996, stayed in Shanghai, then took a posting at the Holiday Inn in Singapore before circling back. By 1998 he was out of the agency system and in a position to make a decision rather than accept a contract. A nameless apartment café at 103 Dongzhu’anbang Lu, in the Changning district, was offered to him effectively rent-free. He took it. Jennifer Yin, whom he would marry and who would become the restaurant’s operational centre of gravity, was already part of the calculation. The next year the place finally had a sign: Da Marco (大马可意大利餐厅). Jennifer says 1999. Marco says 1998. Twenty-seven years later, neither has conceded, and both are probably right in the way people are when they remember the same event from different sides of a counter.

Building a restaurant in a city that had not heard of Parma ham #

The early Da Marco was an exercise in improvisation inside discipline. Parmigiano Reggiano was not importable in Shanghai in 1998. Parma ham arrived, when it arrived, through channels that required patience. Barbieri made his own pasta. He used Chinese rice for risotto when arborio was unavailable. He collected basil and sage from the Italian consulate’s garden. The discipline was not in refusing substitutes — he accepted every substitute the city forced on him — but in refusing to compromise the dish once the substitutes were on the plate.

“We have kept it authentic Italian,” he told the Shanghai Daily in 2019, in a sentence whose understatement is the whole point. Other restaurants Chinesified. He did not. The customers who started walking in — Italian expats, then their friends, then their friends’ parents visiting from Milan — told each other about the place. Marco’s wife Jennifer handled the front of house and, increasingly, everything outside the kitchen. “I was the chef. My wife was the boss,” Barbieri has said, more than once, with the flatness of a man stating a fact he has stopped arguing about.

The SARS year, and the instinct to hold #

The 2003 SARS outbreak was the first real test. It was scary, Barbieri would later tell SmartShanghai, because no one knew what was happening. Other restaurants closed. Da Marco stayed open. “We didn’t have to close,” he said. The sentence is offered without pride. At the time it felt like the sensible thing. In retrospect it was more than that: the regulars who came in during SARS were the regulars for life. A restaurant that keeps its doors open during the first crisis in its lifespan earns a kind of credit that cannot be purchased afterward.

The empire that cost him more life than it returned #

From around 2005, Barbieri started saying yes. Customers kept coming to him with ideas. A Pudong location. An outlet in Xujiahui, inside the Grand Gateway mall. A Jing’an branch. Catering across Minhang. Then a frozen-foods factory. Then airport concessions in Hangzhou and Shenzhen. At its peak the chain had six or more nodes, and the catering arm ranged across multiple cities.

None of it failed in the way business stories usually call failure. The outlets operated. The factory produced. The airport concessions moved product. But each location required a version of Marco that Marco could only partially duplicate — a quality-control trip, a supplier review, a staffing crisis, a tax conversation — and the machinery of it was leaving him less of himself each year.

“We have tried to expand,” he told SmartShanghai in December 2021. “It has been a good experience. We had a factory producing frozen foods, we had ones in Hangzhou and Shenzhen airport, did catering all over China… but after a certain point I said no. Forget it. I just had no more life for it. It was too stressful.”

It is the rarest sentence in China F&B founder interviews. The reason is not that Barbieri is unusually wise. The reason is that most founders at his stage have already sold to a private equity buyer or signed a franchise master agreement and can no longer speak freely. He did neither. He just started closing outlets.

The menu change that humbles the founder #

The second crisis arrived from inside. Around 2020, Barbieri hired a talented young Italian chef and gave him room. The young chef’s vision was fine dining — a rewrite of the menu in the direction of contemporary Italian plating, seasonal tasting menus, the sort of thing that in another city at another time would have worked. In Changning, to a customer base that had been eating the same dishes for twenty years, it did not. Regulars left. Some of them walked out mid-meal. Within weeks it was clear the menu change was a unilateral declaration of divorce, and the customers had voted against it.

Barbieri tells the story now with self-deprecating humour. “We joke he left because a customer tried to kill him,” he says of the young chef, who departed after five or six months. The humour is the register of a founder who has already absorbed the lesson and does not need to dramatise it. The lesson was that Da Marco’s moat was not the recipe. The moat was the familiarity customers felt when they sat down. Changing the menu had not added value — it had removed the only thing that could not be rebuilt in a year.

He reversed course. The pasta came back. The regulars came back, one by one, at a speed that suggested they had been waiting for someone to acknowledge the mistake. Barbieri did not make a press statement. He just put the old menu back on the tables and let the restaurant be what it had always been.

Closing when no one asked him to #

The third crisis arrived from outside. On 1 April 2022, Shanghai’s Puxi district was sealed into a lockdown that would last until 1 June. Da Marco, like every other restaurant on the street, was caught inside it. Barbieri closed. The odd thing — and the Barbieri-typical thing — is that he did not have to. “We closed for COVID,” he told SmartShanghai. “No one asked us, but all the other restaurants closed so we did too. Well … they padlocked the side doors, but left the front door open.”

He could have stayed open, at least partially. He chose not to. Staying open alone, when every neighbour was shut, felt wrong to him. The same instinct that had kept the doors open during SARS now closed them in solidarity during Omicron. Both decisions were structural: they said something about who Barbieri was before they said anything about what Da Marco did. When the restaurant reopened in June, the regulars returned. One customer — the same one who had been coming three or four times a week since the beginning — was back within days.

The cohort that is thinning out #

Barbieri belongs to a specific generation of foreign chefs who arrived in Shanghai in the 1990s and built their institutions before the city’s Western dining scene existed in any organised form. They taught their own suppliers, trained their own staff, and in most cases married into the city. Many of that cohort have now retired or sold. A few have handed their operations to a successor chef or a business partner. Very few have simply stayed on the line, running the kitchen themselves, into a third decade.

Barbieri has. The reasons are not sentimental. He shops at the local wet markets in Mandarin that is conversational rather than fluent — thirty years is long enough to order vegetables but not to conduct a tax dispute. He knows his suppliers by face. He knows which table at the flagship is which regular’s preferred table, and which regular is likely to be on a business trip in which week of the year. That kind of knowledge is not transferable and not writable into a franchise agreement. It is also the only real moat the restaurant has.

Still on the line #

Today in his late fifties, Barbieri is in the kitchen almost every day. The flagship on Dongzhu’anbang Lu is one of two remaining outlets — the other is a Pudong franchise on Yushan Road. The factory is gone. The airport concessions are gone. The catering arm is gone. The chain, as a chain, no longer exists. What remains is the thing he started with: a founder-operated trattoria on a Changning side street, with Jennifer at the front, Barbieri in the back, and a customer base that has grown up and, in some cases, started bringing its children.

In the December 2021 SmartShanghai interview, Barbieri talked about driving a camper van across China when he eventually retires. It was an oddly specific retirement fantasy, named with the certainty of a man who has thought about it. He has not driven the camper van. He is still on the line. The ambivalence is the portrait — a founder who has earned the right to leave, and has chosen, each year, not to.

The lesson from Da Marco is not that scale is wrong. The lesson is that scale has a cost that only the founder can price, and the price is not visible on any income statement. Barbieri priced it, accepted the trade, and unwound the empire in the direction of a life he could recognise as his. What is left is a restaurant that has been at the same address for twenty-seven years and a man who can still be found in its kitchen at lunch — which, to the customer who has been eating there three or four times a week since 1998, is exactly the point.

Last updated: April 30, 2026