From software wizard to pizza royalty: Antonio Miscellaneo stretches beyond the dough with Petra

Antonio Miscellaneo does not order a salad. Spot one on a menu in Singapore, and he passes; in Italy, where it arrives at the end of the meal, he normally declines.

So, it’s ironic that the dish he cannot stop thinking about at Petra, his new Mediterranean restaurant at Dempsey Hill, which opens October 24, is the vibrant Ottolenghi-inspired salad made famous by chef Yotam Ottolenghi. 

Miscellaneo says, “I have been a huge fan of Ottolenghi’s legendary salads and I couldn’t do without them in my Mediterranean restaurant, given that it centres around fresh and nourishing food.”

The Italian chef-restaurateur is so serious about the salad quest that he roped in chef Dawid Nowosadzki, Ottolenghi’s former head chef in London, to co-head the latest venture in his burgeoning restaurant empire. 

The route to that salad, however, starts somewhere less appetising.

Miscellaneo published his first game at 16, moved to London in 1995 to work for Sony Entertainment, and kept building gaming software for more than two decades before settling in Singapore in 2006. He left when the work stopped feeling creative, starting a handbag label and private dining space, Casa Nostra. The unifying thread, he insists, is craftsmanship.

He planned to open La Bottega Enoteca with investors, but after spending nine months in Italy during Covid-19, he returned inspired and decided to venture alone in 2021, as the project was close to his heart. The Joo Chiat restaurant is his wife’s design, filled with antique finds from Italy, and he calls it “a work of love”.

But love does not scale. When a shareholder from Ebb & Flow, now renamed Mission Group, bought his house-made guanciale (“He was probably using guanciale as an excuse to get to know me”) and proposed a joint project, he declined. But once La Bottega could run without him, he went back. 

The reasoning is unromantic. “If I were to open another restaurant on my own, all of the exhaustive functions would have to be repeated by my wife and I, and we were already at capacity,” he recalls, noting that the F&B group already had the infrastructure to scale. “My interest is to focus on the concepts, not on the operations.”

Casa Vostra was born as a pragmatic partnership with Mission Group, alongside founder Lim Kian Chun and serial entrepreneur Jonathan Lim. Though it began as a failure, by Miscellaneo’s own account: ready-to-heat pizza delivered to homes, from a man who says he never believed in delivered pizza.

“I failed, pretty much,” he says. “In Singapore, people prefer to have ready-to-eat rather than ready-to-heat.” He later tested the waters with pop-ups before gunning for a brick-and-mortar restaurant.

Casa Vostra’s inaugural Raffles City outlet opened in July 2024. The snaking queues outlasted everyone’s forecast, his included. Of course, an opening rush is anticipated, but “none of us expected them to last that long”.

His explanation is simple: By his reckoning, it was the first fully fledged Italian restaurant in a Singapore mall. The casual restaurant brand has since expanded to high-traffic shopping centres like Jem and Tampines Mall, while the Wisma Atria outlet is slated to open later this year.

Yet, he harbours no illusions about the retail grind. Operating inside high-traffic malls, he notes, is vastly different from an independent shophouse. “In a shopping mall, you are thrown on the rail, and you have to run as fast as the train, or else you’ll get run over,” he says. 

Secret sauce

Miscellaneo’s secret to maintaining quality without inflating prices amid soaring operational costs is to make everything in-house: pasta, salumi, gelato, and sauces, down to truffle paste made by reducing mushrooms for eight hours.

San Marzano DOP tomatoes cost two to three times more than standard tomatoes, and the mozzarella comes directly from Italy. “What you don’t make on margin, you have to make on volume.” 

High-volume production means relinquishing total control. When he ran Casa Nostra, he touched every dough that went into the dishes; Casa Vostra is a far bigger compromise. “Anything you want to do that doesn’t involve you having to do it will come to some kind of compromise,” he shares.

“I’m willing to accept it.” For instance, new pizzaiolos must pass his dough stretch exam, but “sometimes they pass, sometimes they don’t”.

​Now, Miscellaneo is expanding his canvas once more with Petra. The concept steps away from Italy entirely, diving into the sun-baked flavours of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant.

Though it wasn’t an overnight idea, Petra has been five years in the making, fuelled by his genuine love for the cuisine; its roots tracing back to London’s King’s Road, where just two decades ago, he would regularly walk to a nearby Lebanese cafe for grilled meats, salads, and dips while his colleagues microwaved Marks & Spencer meals.

When the Dempsey site that housed Curly’s, a now-defunct Ebb & Flow project that tried, in his view, to do too many things, became available, Lim and Miscellaneo clicked: “Let’s not do another Italian.”

Miscellaneo admits “he knows very little about salads”, so Nowosadzki, who, by his account, spent over a decade with Ottolenghi, is “100 per cent the author of those salads in Petra”. Diners can look forward to an Ottolenghi-inspired salad bar, alongside a seafood counter. 

Anas Shami, “the most phenomenal Mediterranean cuisine chef we have in Singapore”, became available, by his estimate, when Aniba pivoted. As for Miscellaneo, old habits survive at the pizza counter, where two flatbreads stand in for the pita he says is too often frozen and reheated: soft, sesame-seeded Barbari and thin, crisp Sangak, topped with vibrant Mediterranean flavours instead of the usual Italian suspects. 

Is Petra a bigger swing than his pop-up past suggests? Not in his telling: Casa Vostra, with its central kitchen, was the larger investment.

Mission Group knew within six months that Curly’s was not working, and Petra’s gauge of success, he says, is not the crowd but how many diners come back, a rather unsentimental test for a chef whose second act was built on queues. “Even if we are full, it’s not a good sign because eventually, the hype will fade,” he shares.

On a lighter note, Miscellaneo’s ambition is much plainer, and a touch improbable for a man who skips past salads on a menu. “The dish I can’t wait to eat again is one Singapore has barely met,” he shares. “I wish more people would discover how good (Ottolenghi) salads can be.”