Founder Spotlight: Edoardo Valsecchi (Linfa - Eat Different)
Meet Edoardo Valsecchi:
Linfa - Eat Different is a responsible restaurant concept that welcomes its guests in an elegant and bright atmosphere, made of pastel colours with dominant shades of pink and gold, and a refined gourmet restaurant proposal, 100% vegan, using local healthy and tasty ingredients, all embellished with attentive and polite service.
Startup Stage:
Early Stage, with the end of 2021 we just celebrated 6 months of restaurant operations.
Location:
Milan, Italy
When did you launch the business?
May 2021
What led you to where you are today?
Personal and professional experience. With Linfa I brought to Italy the best of international hospitality formats I experienced as a customer and as an operator during my experiences abroad, however, adapting them to the tastes of Italians, who are very demanding in terms of food and beverage ingredients. The project is proving to be successful, intriguing those who have not yet approached plant-based nutrition and retaining the loyalty of avant-garde cuisine lovers, designed to nourish and amaze, in harmony with the planet.
What do you wish you knew before embarking on your entrepreneurial journey?
I wish I could have realized earlier that my curiosity is my best asset. Since starting my own business I'm constantly learning on the job and staying open to new ideas boosts my performance. I wish I could have known that problems and failures are just lessons that are empowering me to investigate, test, build, and deliver better value for my community, my city, my country, for the world I live in.
What is the most difficult decision you've had to make regarding your business so far?
I made a huge bet: quitted a well-paid, full-time job with a great career ahead; left the city and the country where I was happily living; moved back to Milan to open a fully plant-based restaurant (without any compromises) in the middle of a global pandemic, in a country where the hospitality business is one of the sector suffering the most, in a country where vegans were only 2% of the Italian population.
What can you help the VEGPRENEUR community with?
I gained a lot of experience in the international hospitality sector so I'm more than happy to help the VEGPRENEUR community by making my skills and knowledge related to F&B available to anyone who would need advice on how to run restaurant operations, by sharing my professional and entrepreneurial journey.
How can the VEGPRENEUR community help you?
I'd love to make more connections with blowing-minded people in the vegan / plant-based scene and I would like the community to help me grow Linfa as a brand and scale my restaurant business in order to make my tasty, responsible and sustainable restaurant concept more accessible in Italy, and not only.
Fun fact about you:
My celebrity crushes are vegan ;)
Anything else you would like to share?
Thanks to all those of you who wake up every day to make our world a better place.
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