This site, as well as our company, RUSTICO COOKING, is our baby.

A brief history

Micol was born in Milan and moved to Montreal in 1977. Dino was born in Montreal.

We met in Montreal in 1987 at McGill University, where Dino was studying biochemistry and Micol was studying psychology, women's studies, and social work. After completing her bachelor's degree, Micol went to cooking school at Canada's premier culinary academy, L'Institut du Tourisme et de l'Hotellerie du Quebec, and opened her own catering company.

After completing his Ph. D in 1995, Dino was offered a postdoctoral position at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to work on cutting edge biomedical research - so we got married and moved to New York City. In 1996, Micol got a job at the just-launched The Magazine of La Cucina Italiana, where she soon became the editor and chief writer. She quit the magazine in 2002 to focus on teaching Italian cooking across the US and Canada full time and on writing cookbooks; she wrote three cookbooks, the James Beard-nominated Rustico: Regional Italian Country Cooking and The Italian Grill, both published by Clarkson Potter, and The Best Pasta Sauces: Favorite Regional Italian Recipes, released by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House.

In 2004, Micol (with Dino's help) opened a large, state-of-the-art cooking school on West 39th street in Manhattan and launched cooking tours to Italy.

Meanwhile, while still working at MSKCC, Dino developed the website, took photos for Micol's cookbooks, and realized he preferred the world of Italian food and travel to being in a research lab all day. In 2006, he left the world of research science behind to focus his energies on growing the business.

Over the years, we cooked with more than 10,000 people at our Manhattan cooking school; we loved meeting so many enthusiastic home cooks, helping them hone their skills and widen their culinary repertoire. It was a really exciting adventure, but it was also very tiring, and it was all-consuming: we had very little time to ourselves and could never really detach. So after 15 years, we felt it was time for a new chapter in our lives, and on January 31, 2020, we taught our last cooking class at our Midtown NYC school.

After many years of going back and forth from the US to Italy, we made our dream come true and moved to a small town on the Ligurian Coast in 2023.

We spend our time leading cooking tours to Italy, developing recipes for our video cooking site, and hosting virtual cooking events for clients around the world.

Dino is the master of all things technical and administrative: he films the lessons for our video membership site, edits the content, composes the music, maintains the website, and more. Micol conceives, writes, and tests the recipes, and is the one whose voice you hear and hands you see on the videos. The recipes are from our years traveling throughout Italy and, as Dino likes to say, each one has been tested (and tasted) time and again... a task he enjoys thoroughly.

A little more about us: we lost a lot of weight over the years and managed to keep it off despite the fact that we are around food all day long. Since 2006, Dino lost 65 pounds, and Micol lost 45 pounds. We did this very simply: by eating homemade food, avoiding anything processed or artificial, filling up mostly on fresh vegetables and fruit. We don't deprive ourselves of rich foods; we eat cheese, cream, extra-virgin olive oil, butter, and chocolate on a daily basis, but in small amounts. We have dessert and sourdough bread (always homemade) every day. But we exercise daily and weigh ourselves daily, so we never lose sight of how easy it is to gain the weight back.

That's who we are and what we do. We hope to get to know you as you explore the recipes on this site, and to bring a little bit of Italy to your kitchen.

Happy cooking, and buon appetito! Micol Negrin and Dino De Angelis

Join us in Italy on the culinary trip of a lifetime, or book a day-long cooking class in our state-of-the-art kitchen 30 minutes from Genova in northern Italy. Click here for details, tour dates, and pricing.