“Altrove Ristorante – Porte Aperte sul Mondo” is a “social restaurant”, a bakery, a café, and a meeting place.

Altrove opened in February 2017 at Prova Roma, in via Girolamo Benzoni 34, in the Ostiense district.

The restaurant is part of a broader project – MaTeChef- which, in 2016 and 2017, offered 4 training courses in intercultural cuisine to 60 Italian and foreign young people, allowing them to qualify as kitchen and bar staff and bakers.

The MaTeChef project was born in our Youth Centre and Art School “MaTeMù”, as part of SOFeL, our Vocational Training and Professional Counselling Desk. It offered professional and vocational training and internship activities to Italian, second-generation young people, and young refugees, who have qualified as cooks, bakers, and kitchen staff.

All trained young people have taken part in two-month paid internships and many of them have found a job in famous Roman restaurants. Eight young people have been hired by the Altrove restaurant.

Altrove is a project aimed at social and working inclusion, offering concrete opportunities to young people from challenging backgrounds. It is also a school for food service operatives and a permanent training workshop, offering opportunities for growth both on a day-to day basis and when the restaurant becomes an actual school, where lessons and workshops take place.

Altrove is an intercultural place where professional chefs work side by side with the young people trained thanks to the MaTeChef project or in our kitchen, bakery, and restaurant, day after day.

Altrove opens its doors to different cultures. The typical fragrance and taste of Italian cuisine mix with the scent of foods coming from distant lands, thus giving birth to unique dishes. It is a place allowing different cultures and diverse culinary traditions to come together, thanks to the young people – ten different nationalities! – working at Altrove.

Our restaurant offers ethical food, that is, food which is good from all points of view: it does taste good, but it also represents something beneficial for people and the environment. Our raw materials are carefully chosen and cruelty-free, and come from suppliers actively involved in environmental protection, and protecting workers’ rights. Our tomatoes, fruit and vegetables are supplied by agricultural firms refusing gangmastering practices (i.e. workers being illegally employed in the agricultural sector at very low wages). Besides, our suppliers do not make use of the contaminants and pollutants often used in intensive agriculture.

Altrove protects the rights of all the members of its staff.

Altrove is a social enterprise whose primary objective is to support CIES Onlus social and non-profit projects.

Our challenge is to give new value to our founding ethical values and generate new income to be re-invested into our mission, so that our programmes and projects – or, at least, part of them – are independent from public or private investments, often variable and always linked to the financers’ agenda.