The sun was still bright and doing its damage by the time Dario Cecchini walked through the doors of Carna by Dario Cecchini at the SLS Baha Mar in Nassau.
It’s my second time in the Bahamas, and Dario’s tenth or so. I love being near the sea, and Nassau has a way of making everything feel brighter. Dario is just as fond of it. He loves the Bahamas, he tells me. But more than the turquoise water or the white sand beaches, what draws him in is the people. “Mi piacciono le persone,” he said. The people. Always the people. “Le Bahamas sono bellissime”, he added. These islands are absolutely gorgeous.
Given that Dario doesn’t speak much English, his wife, Kim, sat beside him throughout our conversation, translating his Italian with the ease of someone who has done it a thousand times.
“Bene, bene,” he said, after I asked how he’s been. No translation needed for that response. I don’t know any Italian outside of “Buongiorno!” but I can pick up on a few words.
Dario is the kind of man who makes you forget you had questions prepared. He’s 64, burly in stature, but has the warmest demeanor and the most adorable smile.
He is an eighth-generation butcher from Panzano in Chianti, Tuscany, and something of a living relic, except that word undersells the energy he brings along into every room. His historic butcher shop, Antica Macelleria Cecchini, has been in his family for over 250 years. He has been working there for 51 of those years. He was the subject of an episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table. And now, he is in the Bahamas to host a special dinner built around Westholme Australian Wagyu, served in a restaurant that bears his name at one of the most stunning resorts I’ve ever been to in the Caribbean.
Later, guests will be greeted on the patio of Carna by a stacked, three-course menu of assorted meats courtesy of Westholme, a premium beef brand in Australia, where the meat is a mix of Japanese Wagyu and Australian cattle.
Tenderloin, steak tartare, beef carpaccio, smoked Wagyu, the tomahawk, and a butterfly branzino for those who wanted a break from beef were served. Sides of creamed spinach, macaroni and cheese, and mashed potatoes felt like comfort food, the kind of comfort food you’d eat on Thanksgiving surrounded by friends and family. This feeling is exactly what Dario strives to provide back home in Italy during the family-style dinners in his restaurants, Officina della Bistecca and Solociccia. And he’s deliberate about bringing that feeling to Carna.
The plates at Carna are decorated with symbols of a wine glass, a three-arm candle, a rose, and a floating cow. “It’s not about Australia, Tuscany, or the Bahamas,” he told me. “It’s the synthesis, the root of our human civilization… Food is a gift that we must share.” A room full of people from different places, eating together, and socializing over symbols that predate all of them.
A product like Westholme Wagyu, raised on the other side of the world from the Tuscany hills, is a step outside his norm. He’s used to being able to see, raise, and take care of the cows before they’re butchered. When I asked what he looks for first as a butcher working with something grown in such a different landscape, he emphasized that it’s not about the source but the destination.
“When we receive something as precious as this beautiful Wagyu that is raised in Australia by Westholme, it’s even more important to be sure that the final product is something wonderful.” The goal, as always, isn’t just the cut itself but what the guest carries out when they leave. “They carry out of the restaurant, in their hearts, the experience that we have been able to give them.”
Dario Cecchini by Creviii Media Group
Butchery is an art and, when done right, is similar to an artist performing. Dario is a performer. There’s no other word for it. When I asked what matters most in that moment before he begins performing, whether it’s the knife, the fire, the silence before everything begins, he spoke about transformation. “I think food must be the most ancient form of communication,” he said. “But to communicate, I have to create an ambience, I have to create an experience. You need fire, you need your knife, you need the meat. It’s like a musical composition.” The audience is just as important in all of this. We’re the whole point.
But Dario’s philosophy runs deeper than any technique or dinner. He has been working for 51 years, at the tail end of 250 years of family history passed from father to son. The butcher trade isn’t nearly as popular as it used to be. Fewer young people are entering it. In Tuscany, wine and truffles draw more attention and money. Surprisingly, Dario isn’t troubled in the least by this.
“Yes, wine and truffles are a very big market in my region. But I’m a butcher. The journey of my life is to possess art, but also to send a message to the new generations,” he said. “The work of a butcher is directed first towards animals than towards humans.”
That ordering, animals before humans, isn’t performative. It’s the foundation everything else is built on. Long before he picked up a knife professionally, Dario had wanted to be a veterinarian. He went off to school to study for it. It wasn’t until his father’s death that he made the decision to take over the family business. The two paths seemed fundamentally at odds from the outside, but the transition wasn’t a tough one for Dario.
He assumed the responsibility of taking care of his family and pushed his dreams of becoming a veterinarian to the side. But his love and respect for animals never left him. He just transferred that same care to a different profession. “It may seem that the two things are antagonistic, but in my peasant civilization, the two things have always been together,” he explained.
He compared butchery to the artistry necessary to make the most delicious wine, in that both trades demand patience, reverence for raw materials, and the understanding that your job is to create something extraordinary.
“I want the animals to have the happiest life possible. The most honest and compassionate death possible.” He speaks about using every part of the animal, wasting nothing, finding the best recipe for every cut as a form of gratitude. “This is my way of giving thanks and honoring the animal that has sacrificed for us to be nourished.” There’s a sacred quality to the way he talks about this. It feels almost religious, in a way, to come to terms with what it means to take a life in exchange for sustaining others.
Dario is highly aware of the responsibility that comes with that transaction, and he doesn’t take it for granted.
Growing up in a farming community, caring for animals well was innate for him because their well-being became your own. He actually saw a veterinarian for his own medical care until he was 30 years old, until the man retired. When I mentioned that was unheard of growing up in America , he chuckled. “It was my choice to stay as close as possible to the life of the animals,” he said. “In the end, I think the butcher lives more with the animals than with humans.”
What stayed with me most, though, was what he said about tradition being something fragile that requires active tending. “Tradition is inside oneself,” he said. “And I think that really the only thing that you truly possess is what you are able to give away, what you are able to pass along. Being jealous and holding on too tight, not sharing your knowledge and your tradition, is something that is detrimental to the world.”
Only the things you give away are truly yours. Only what you teach, what you communicate, and what you give to the world makes you genuinely an artist.
He gave a metaphor that felt very much like him. “I think of my life’s journey as tossing a bottle out into the sea with a message in it that I hope somebody will receive and be inspired by.”
Talking about keeping traditions alive from generations before him and generations to come, Dario became emotional. His eyes filled with tears, his voice caught. But he steadied himself and continued, “When I speak like this, I feel that together with me, I am the father, the grandfather, and the whole family that is no longer there. With these words that you have drawn out of me, I feel that I am closer to my father and my grandfather and the family that has come before me. I feel them near me. And I feel like I’m honoring the art of butchery and I’m honoring the art of good people,” he said.
Something shifted in the room. He was quiet for a moment, and so was I. Tradition, he said, is something you hold carefully, but you can’t be trapped inside it.
“You want to be very delicate with it, but you also don’t want to perform too much. You want to open your arms and carry on.” There’s a generosity in that image of carrying something old into somewhere new, whether that somewhere is a younger generation or a restaurant in Nassau where the plates show symbols older than everyone in the room.
The most important lesson his parents gave him, he said, had nothing to do with knives or the right way to honor a cut. “I think the most important thing that my parents taught me is to always try to be a good man. Yeah, first, before anything else.”