Manon Santini: the pizzaiola rising star of Monaco

At just 29 years old, Manon Santini has mastered a thousand things — sculpted entremets, tricolored flans, éclairs resembling Japanese vases — yet it's her sweet pizzette that are now thrusting her into the spotlight. Take her strawberry version: a long-fermented dough, red fruit compote, crisp cherries, fresh almonds, and above all, a swirl of cream inspired by Meilleur Ouvrier de France pastry chef Yann Brys. The result? A hypnotic vortex that recalls haute-couture cakes while keeping the friendly spirit of a pizza slice you tear with your hands. The same aesthetic carries over to her “choco-gianduja,” a glossy black disc filled with hazelnut praline — so viral that the Bagatelle restaurant group added it to menus in seven countries. When she posted the creation on Instagram, the numbers went wild: 120,000 views.

THE "MADAME SWEET" OF THE BAGATELLE GROUP

Since 2020, Manon Santini has been the pastry chef for the group founded by Rémi Laba and Aymeric Clemente. Behind the scenes, she crafts snow eggs shaped like stars, milk chocolate petal tarts, and yuzu domes that burst under the spoon. These are spectacular, Instagram-ready desserts, designed to travel from Dubai to Saint-Tropez without losing their precision, and they’re now served in seven countries. To test her ideas live, the chef launched the pop-up restaurant Zia in 2024 with Italian chef Rocco Seminara, inside the Hôtel Métropole in Monaco, which also houses the prestigious two-star Les Ambassadeurs restaurant run by Christopher Cussac, a longtime lieutenant of Joël Robuchon. It was Cussac who invited the Santini–Seminara duo. Zia was only meant to last one season, but the concept returns with every sunny spell, and regulars now reserve dessert as soon as their table is confirmed.

PERFECT BAKING AND NEAPOLITAN EXPERTISE

“We have such big ambitions for this product (pizza),” says Manon Santini over the phone, emphasizing that baking a pizza is just as complex as cooking a premium cut of meat even if it starts with something as simple as water, salt, and flour. The dough Manon and Rocco use blends three different flours, and in some versions, a mix of seeds, resulting in a crust that’s both ultra-light and incredibly crisp. But it’s the baking that makes all the difference, or nearly so, as one expert once explained, capable of working wonders even with “a lousy ball of dough.” In Naples, the birthplace of pizza, insiders know that alongside the pizzaiolo, the real key to a world-class pie lies with the fornaio, the oven master who knows the flame’s every nuance and the character of each type of wood used to fuel it.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Gastronomy in general — and pizza in particular — has “always appealed” to Manon Santini, she admits. No surprise there: she grew up surrounded by it. Her father, Serge, paved the way, working as a chef for the Accor group before launching… his own pizza truck in 2017. Set up in the village of Châteauneuf-le-Rouge, “Pizzas du Cengle – Chez Sergio” still delights locals, serving up bugnes and crêpes scented with orange and rum depending on the season. A family with a sweet tooth? You bet. After graduating from the Bonneveine hospitality school in Marseille (recently renamed Jean-Paul Passedat in honor of the late founder of Le Petit Nice and father of chef Gérald Passedat), Manon built a strong résumé from working with Bruno Oger on the Côte d’Azur (two Michelin stars and maestro of the Cannes Film Festival’s opening dinners), to training at the Plaza Athénée during the heyday of Christophe Michalak, the chef who turned luxury pastry chefs into full-blown celebrities.

A CONCEPT READY TO TRAVEL

When Manon Santini won one of the events at the Pizza World Cup in Rome in 2019 with her citrus and Timut pepper pizza, she was immediately recognized as a rising star of the pizza world. And that’s saying something — there aren’t many women in the field. One notable peer is Marthe Brejon of Centre Culturel in Paris, who kneads her dough by hand and is currently in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome. The pizza scene remains fairly conservative, perhaps even more so than haute cuisine — which was already not the most progressive to begin with. In Italy, even in major cities, it’s still common to see pizzerias hire only men. “We bring our identity, what we know and what we’ve spent years learning, to serve the pizza,” said Rocco Seminara in a 2024 interview with Monaco Hebdo, adding that they hope to expand the Zia concept to destinations beyond Monte-Carlo. Paris next, maybe?

By Pomélo