Our History
Restaurant Papà Francesco has been established since 1980 as a discreet and welcoming meeting place for national and international customers.
Augusto Bonomo, one fine day many years ago, realized that Porto Torres, a small town in Sardinia where he was born, had become too confining for him, and therefore he decided to escape, to cut the moorings and test his talent, his creativity, and his spirit of adventure.
After a brief stint as a fisherman, he refined his passion for cooking by enrolling in the hotel school 'La Capannina dei Franceschi' in Forte dei Marmi. His skill did not go unnoticed and reached the palate of Dino De Laurentiis and his wife Silvana Mangano, who chose him as their personal chef in their residence 'Villa Catena'.
After several years of great satisfaction, he left that coveted position to increase his experience as a chef and arrived in Milan. For a good ten years, he worked at the Santa Lucia restaurant, captained by the legendary Signora Rosetta Legnani from whom he received great teachings and recognition, but Augusto Bonomo was still missing something; he felt the need to have a restaurant of his own. In those days, it wasn't easy to have a business of that type, so together with 2 other partners, he decided to take over the Papà Francesco Restaurant on Via Plana, patented the brand, and restored it.
In addition to refined and classy cuisine, he gave this restaurant that human warmth that is often missing in establishments. This is the secret of Papà Francesco's success and therefore of Augusto Bonomo, a formula easy to say but difficult to apply. The Japanese understood this immediately, as they know how to disassemble everything to reproduce it in an even more perfect way, but regarding the imitation of a Papà Francesco, they could not have done without the creative touch of its inventor, Augusto Bonomo.
One fine day in 1991, a Japanese person presented himself to Augusto Bonomo on behalf of Sanmangoku, a Japanese company that has a chain of 50 pastry shops and 16 restaurants in the Land of the Rising Sun. This company was thinking about an Italian restaurant similar to Papà Francesco to transplant to Japan. Augusto Bonomo was flattered by this and embarked on this new great adventure, 'away with chopsticks and space for silver-plated alpaca cutlery'.
But the excitement doesn't end there. As often happens, partnerships with other people don't last forever, and that's why Augusto Bonomo formed a company with people he could trust blindly - his wife Rita and his son Paolo. And so, together with his family, he decided to open an establishment on Via Degli Ailanti, a place in the outskirts with a large garden. This establishment was also built up with consistency and sacrifice, attributes that Augusto Bonomo has never lacked.
But the turning point in his life (the so-called 'hitting the jackpot') came in 1997 when Augusto Bonomo was offered the opportunity to manage an establishment in the center of the world, that is, in Piazza della Scala. At this point, Papà Francesco began to distinguish itself from all the long-established places, becoming one of the best restaurants in the center. Through word of mouth, this name reached everywhere in Italy and abroad, to the point that even distant newspapers like theDetroit Free Press, a Michigan newspaper, began to talk about Papà Francesco, a family-run establishment in the center of Milan where both the food and atmosphere are of great quality. Well yes, at this point Augusto Bonomo feels rewarded for all those great sacrifices he made throughout his life, and only now can he calmly say.
It was worth it!