Stanley Tucci Wouldn't Open a Restaurant with His Chef Son

• Stanley Tucci would like to open an "incredibly small" restaurant one day.
• Though his son Nicolo, 23, is a chef in London, Tucci said working together on this project "would completely destroy the relationship."
• Tucci is also dad to Isabel, 23, Camilla, 21, Matteo, 8, and Emilia, 5.

Stanley Tucci has dreams of turning his viral cooking videos into a restaurant — but not as a family business.

In an interview posted Monday on Radio Cherry Bombe, the Hunger Games actor spoke with chef Missy Robbins about the possibility of opening a restaurant of his own.

“Do you have aspirations to own a restaurant? You are so in [the food world] now,” asked Robbins, a James Beard Award-winning chef behind New York City restaurants Lilia, Misi and the new MISIPASTA store.

“Would I like to do it? Yes,” Tucci quickly answered. He continued to explain that he was recently offered the opportunity to open up a restaurant in a hotel but he passed on this endeavor because it was “too big.”

“Would I like to do something incredibly small? Yes," he added.

Tucci then said he’d want a restaurant with daily menu changes and a few staple dishes plus very few wines. But he is “not a chef” so he wouldn’t be there cooking. 

“You have a son who could make the vision happen,” Robbins suggested.

One of the actor’s older children Nicolo, 23, just graduated from Leiths School of Food and Wine in London and is currently working at London’s St. John restaurant.

“That would completely destroy the relationship," Tucci replied with a laugh. "But no, I'd like to have something really small, intimate, brown paper on the thing. Like an osteria."

Also on Radio Cherry Bombe, Tucci and Robbins connected throughout the interview on their shared love of Italian food.

“I’m fascinated by food and why the world eats what it eats,” said Tucci, who just launched a new cookware line available exclusively at Williams Sonoma, TUCCI by GreenPan.

“Growing up, eating was everything,” he said, adding that he used to pack massive school lunches with eggplant parmigiana, veal cutlets with butter and lettuce or frittata with peppers. “It becomes a focal point, it becomes the punctuation at the end of the day. Everything that was wonderful and everything that was repressed would show itself at the table.”

Robbins asked if the Tucci household only served Italian food but the Devil Wears Prada star explained that his mother would make paella, “which I think is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had,” and other Spanish and French dishes. When asked if his father cooked, Tucci explained that he was the “sous chef.”

Tucci is dad to five children. He welcomed twins Isabel and Nicolo, 23, and daughter Camilla, 21 with his late wife Kate, who died of breast cancer in 2009. Tucci also has two children, Matteo, 8, and Emilia, 5, with wife Felicity Blunt.

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