CHEF PROFILES | PALM BEACH

Chef Mauro Colagreco Built a Three-Michelin-Starred Career From the Family Table

By Eric Barton | March 27, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Mauro Colagreco’s memories of his Argentinian childhood begin with a table. It was crowded with aunts and cousins and grandparents, full of dishes passed around, somebody always cooking one more thing.

In La Plata, in a family of Italian and Spanish roots, food was not decoration or hobby. It was the center of the day. The center of everything. His mother cooked daily, even with both parents working. His father handled the fire, the asados, and went further than that into paella, locro, even strudel on cold weekends. Then there was his grandmother, Amalia, the force at the center of those big holiday meals in the countryside, the one who seems to have taught the whole family that feeding people was a form of love, with a little grandeur to it. As Colagreco put it to me, “I had a very happy childhood, marked by these moments of sharing.”

Colagreco is now one of the most decorated chefs in the world, the Argentine-born force behind restaurants including Mirazur in Menton, France, and Florie's at the Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach. He’s earned a distinction few chefs achieve: three stars from the Michelin Guide. And in a business with lots of people putting “celebrity” in front of chef, Colagreco remains someone guided by memory, place, and the instinct to build something generous enough to hold other people.

Colagreco at Florie's Palm Beach

His route there was not especially tidy. He started in economics, following what looked like a sensible road and imagining he might one day take over his father’s accounting practice. Then he hit the point that ruins plenty of respectable plans: he realized he could not picture a life in it. He told his father, expecting disappointment, and instead got permission. “Mauro, I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he recalled his father saying. “Now you need to think about your own path.”

That path took him to culinary school in Buenos Aires and then, quickly, into restaurant kitchens, where he knew right away he had found the thing. “The very first day I stepped into the kitchen, I was immediately captivated,” he told me. “There was no doubt: this was exactly what I wanted to do.” There is something useful in how plainly he says that. No mythology. No talk of destiny descending from the heavens. He walked into a kitchen and felt the click.

Mirazur

France came next in 2001, and not in some dreamy version softened by hindsight. He arrived as a young Argentine chef without enough French to get into the school where he had applied. So he went to Bordeaux, studied the language, absorbed the culture, and kept moving. “What helped me progress the most was speaking with people, exchanging ideas, and discovering the fascinating world of French wine and gastronomy,” he said. “Every conversation, every encounter, was a lesson.”

Florie’s

The Mirazur garden

He opened Mirazur in 2006 in Menton, just up the coast from Monaco. He was an Argentine chef of Italian descent, trained in France, opening a restaurant on the French Riviera near the Italian border, and he leaned into the complexity. “I wanted to create a cuisine without borders,” he told me, “true to my journey and influences, while remaining deeply anchored in the region I lived in.” That has become his signature, not just in Menton but in the way he talks about every new project: arrive, listen, learn the territory, meet the producers, build a community, cook from there.

By now, Colagreco’s work stretches far beyond Menton, with 25 restaurants around the world. The restaurants span countries and formats, from high-end flagships to hotel projects, yet the through line remains unusually consistent: local products, a strong sense of place, and a refusal to flatten everything into some interchangeable luxury brand.

Côte by Mauro Colagreco, Bangkok

That same approach shows up at Florie’s, his restaurant at the Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach and still his only restaurant in the United States. The restaurant opened in November 2018, and the setup makes sense for him: Mediterranean cooking, live fire, Florida produce, herbs from the garden, and a stretch of coastline that he has said reminds him of the South of France. He says Palm Beach is “a stimulating place to work and a space where I can be surprised, learn, and recharge.”

Florie’s

Mirazur

Even now, with Palm Beach on his calendar and an international reputation secure, that idea seems to be the thing he keeps returning to. Not fame. Not scale. A place, a table, the people around it, and the work of making something worth sharing.