Where is MasterChef's Luca now? The first thing he built after the trophy flopped — he says so himself
Luca Manfè won MasterChef season 4 on September 11, 2013, becoming the first male and first non-American-born winner in the show's US run. He took home $250,000 and a cookbook deal. He'd been rejected in the season 3 audition round a year earlier and came back anyway. Then he did what most winners do, which is the part he'd take back.
Manfè runs a private catering business called Dinner with Luca, teaches online cooking classes, and operates culinary tours of Italy. His food truck, The Lucky Fig, opened in Houston and closed after about a year. He now lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two kids, and has a new cookbook and an Italian-made knife line in progress.
What happened to The Lucky Fig
The concept was high-end farm-to-table Italian served out of a truck. It moved 7,000 customers and catered 26 events in its first year, and it still didn't work — Manfè has said plainly that the food was wrong for the format, because people at a truck window want street food. When his four investors asked to be bought out, he shut it down in December 2016.
A Dallas investment fund briefly relaunched the truck in early 2017 with Manfè keeping the menu and the branding.
He's since been direct about the underlying mistake, telling hospitality site OysterLink in 2026 that he turned down restaurant work out of ego and would handle it differently now:
"Winning grants you the MasterChef title, but it doesn't turn you into a real chef. "
What he actually does now
- Dinner with Luca — private in-home fine dining, kept deliberately small; his largest event in Pennsylvania was 35 guests.
- Online classes — recipe videos and paid cooking courses run from his own site.
- Italy with Luca — small-group tours of family wineries and restaurants in Italy, launched in 2025; the third trip nearly sold out in a week.
- Brand work — ambassador for pizza-oven company Donna Italia since 2018.
- In development — a second cookbook and a knife line manufactured near where he grew up in northeast Italy.
Was the win worth it?
He says yes, with an asterisk. Before the show he'd spent 15 years managing restaurants in the US, working his way from floor manager to general manager at Michelin-starred rooms in New York. The win opened doors, but it also convinced him to stop doing the thing he was already good at. Eleven years of building his own businesses got him back to a place where a chef job would be plausible — through the work, not the trophy.
For the record: his first MasterChef audition, in season 3, was Venetian calf's liver with Parmesan polenta. Gordon Ramsay sent him home and told him to come back the next year.
He did, with broccoli rabe ravioli, and got the apron.