Feature

16 Sep 2026

A seat at the table

Step inside the Aston Martin Aramco hospitality experience at the Italian Grand Prix, as the team continued its season-long culinary collaborations – this time with one of Milan's most iconic restaurants: Veramente.

The Italian Grand Prix paddock is hot. Radiantly hot. Mediterranean heat rises from the tarmac and settles on your shoulders. A late-summer European heatwave is in full swing at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza.

The whole place is in motion. Mechanics move with purpose. Guests weave through the paddock. Somewhere nearby, an engine fires into life. It's an addictive, sensorial onslaught.

Then, you step inside The House: Aston Martin Aramco's paddock hospitality.

The temperature drops. The noise softens. The pace changes.

You head to the top floor, you have a table waiting. The team will take it from here.

Upstairs, a cool drink arrives as you take your seat. For a moment, there is nowhere you need to be. You look back at the paddock you've just walked through, process the colour and heat and energy of it, and take in where you are.

And then you smell it.

Basil. Tomato. Parmesan.

A plate of pasta arrives in front of you: vibrant, glossy, handmade. It looks almost too good to disturb. Created by one of Milan's most exciting pasta restaurants, Veramente, and delivered inside Aston Martin Aramco's hospitality at the heart of an F1 weekend.

You take your first bite.

And for a moment, the rest of the weekend can wait...

Milan meets the paddock

Hospitality at Aston Martin Aramco is not about just putting food in front of people. It is about creating another layer to the experience of being inside the F1 paddock: taking the character of the destination, finding the people who best understand it and bringing their expertise into the team's world.

That is the thinking behind the team's culinary collaborations as some of the most exciting chefs in the industry bring their cooking to our guests.

In Monza, the collaboration was with Veramente.

Based in nearby Milan, Veramente was founded with a simple but ambitious idea: to celebrate Italy from north to south.

A restaurant built around Italian food in all its variety, it brings together more than 50 dishes from across the country's regions. Its co-founder Filippo Mottolese describes the restaurant as a big living room: convivial, welcoming and designed around the pleasure of eating together.

Its executive chef, Federico Lanzafame, brings a deep connection to that cuisine.

His first mentor was his grandmother, herself a chef. He studied food technology before beginning his career in Turin, eventually moving to Milan and learning the foundations of classic Italian cooking from some of the city's most respected chefs, including Francesco Passalacqua.

"Formula One is about precision. So is the kitchen," he says.

"The team calculates everything to the millimetre on the car, and that's what we do when preparing our food.

"It's an honour to be working alongside Aston Martin Aramco. I'm very passionate about motorsport as well as cooking, so I'm very excited to be here."

The menu

A handful of delicious pasta dishes form the centrepiece of the collaboration, each offering a different expression of Italian cooking. Some are familiar, others demand a little more attention.

But first, to start, Scarpetta, served as a sharing dish for the whole table. It's Veramente's take on the classic Italian ritual of fare la scarpetta, served with a trio of sauces that recreate the colours of the Italian flag.

Then there is fusilloni pomodoro with aged Parmesan. There is trofie al pesto Genovese – a small, tightly twisted pasta shape traditionally made by rolling pieces of dough beneath the hand – a labour-intensive process that makes its way onto the plate looking deceptively simple.

There is ragu, and there is Nerano: courgette and basil transformed into a vivid green pasta, which happens to sit beautifully against Aston Martin Aramco's own visual identity.

And at the other end of the meal, Veramente's moreish gelato.

This is not just scooped from a tub and carried upstairs. Veramente have brought a gelato machine into the paddock, allowing the dessert to be made on-site and finished at the table with different toppings.

The ingredients

The beauty of being in Italy in summer is that the produce does much of the talking.

For Charlie Malik, Aston Martin Aramco Senior Sous Chef and VIP Menu Lead, one of the pleasures of working in Europe is being able to step away from the usual supply chain and into the places where the ingredients themselves dictate what comes next.

"You arrive with an idea for a menu but your mind soon starts whirring when you see what's on offer in local markets," he explains.

"Porcini mushrooms, freshly foraged, with the mud still clinging to them. The aubergines, the tomatoes, the courgettes. Everything in Italy this time of year is perfectly in season."

And because Veramente has its own specialist suppliers for meat and vegetables, the collaboration can go even further – bringing ingredients into our hospitality that might otherwise never make it through a conventional supply chain. The result is food rooted in its surroundings.

World-class hospitality

The collaboration goes beyond what's on the plate.

Aston Martin is a quintessentially British marque, with a history built on craftsmanship, performance and luxury.

Veramente, meanwhile, brings the warmth of Italian hospitality, the detail of handmade pasta, and the confidence of a cuisine that knows exactly where it comes from.

Inside The House, those worlds meet.

A hospitality experience can never be one-size-fits-all: a family arriving at its first Grand Prix might need something different from a group of business guests.

That is where Toby Mayne, one of the Senior Hosts, and the front of house team come in.

Toby's background is in high-end hospitality, and the attention to detail, the attentiveness to each individual, are attributes that naturally transfer.

"Each guest is different and has different needs, but our approach is that every guest is the most important person in the room," he says.

That goes for every race weekend but, in Monza, it carried an Italian twist.

"We're bringing Italian service style and Italian food into a very British atmosphere, and it's a real blend. Veramente have provided their own serving staff to work with us this weekend, so it's been a true collaboration.

"What we offer as a team is truly unique. You look at everything else in the paddock and we do things just that bit differently."

Back at the table

Back upstairs, another plate lands.

The pasta is still warm. The pesto is bright. The Parmesan is rich. The sauce clings to every twist and fold.

Around the table, conversation continues. Glasses are raised. Somewhere beyond the windows, the paddock is still moving at full speed.

But here, for a few minutes, time feels different. That is the trick of great hospitality.

You are already inside an unforgettable experience by being in the Formula One paddock. The challenge is to create something within it that can match it.

As Toby says, the aim is to 'provide an unforgettable experience in an already unforgettable experience'.

How do you make being in the F1 paddock even more memorable? The answer is on the table.

It is in the ingredients brought in from local suppliers. In the chef who learned his craft from his grandmother. In the Veramente team arriving with its own equipment and expertise. In Charlie and the Aston Martin Aramco chefs working alongside them and bringing it all to life. It is the result of months of planning by all involved to make collaborations like this a success.

And, by the time the final bite disappears, the journey from Milan to the paddock is complete.

You take a seat, the team takes care of the rest.