If canned pasta labels are anything to go by, the stereotypical Italian chef is round, shall we say, and jolly.Alejandro Martinez Guadiano, the new sous chef at Bacci restaurant at the Fairmont Southampton Hotel, isn't your stereotypical Italian chef.To start with he cooks Italian food, but he's Argentinian with Italian, Ukrainian and Spanish heritage, and he is definitely not round.“I like to run to stay fit,” said Mr Guadiano in a recent interview with The Royal Gazette. “I came third in the employees' category in the Fairmont to Fairmont half-marathon held last January.“I am also planning to run the Lindo's to Lindo's 10K in March. I would say maybe 15 years ago, the idea of a chef was a big guy but cooking has changed so much in the past couple of years.”As a teenager growing up in Argentina, Mr Guadiano wanted to become a lawyer, but the process took too long.He didn't want to wait until age 25 or 26 to start his life, so he became a chef instead, starting out his career much earlier.“I started working when I was 16 years old and I never stopped, fortunately,” he said. “I trained in restaurants in Argentina, France and Italy.“As a teenager, I started helping my grandmother in the kitchen. She was a very good cook. The funny thing is, I started with pasta with my Spanish grandmother.“On Sundays, we would have 20 people in my family making lunch and having meats and antipasta, and whatever you could imagine. Sometimes it involved a roast, sometimes a barbeque and sometimes pasta with braised meat sauce.”In Italy, he worked as head chef at the Molino Astrone Hotel near Chiusi, Tuscany and then as sous chef at Michelin-starred restaurant Villa Il Patriarca in Val di Chiana, Italy and, most recently, the prestigious Poggio alla Sala Resort in Montepulciano, Italy.“My first three years in Italy, I worked in five different Michelin star restaurants with one and two stars,” said Mr Guadiano. “It is very difficult for a restaurant to get even one star. In some ways, it was quite stressful to work for a restaurant like that.“You have to have a lot of passion. You can't be there if you are not passionate.It is not an office job. Sometimes you are there from 8am to maybe midnight straight. It never stops. It means a lot of pressure. It means that you have to love what you do and have to get it done perfectly.”He decided to move to Bermuda to work, because it was time for a change, and he had always dreamed of living and working on a tropical island.“Working in an atmosphere like this is something I have always dreamed of,” he said. “For me, Bermuda, with temperatures like this in the winter, is paradise.”He thought the Newport Room at the Fairmont Southampton Hotel was good for one or even two Michelin stars, but it depended on Michelin and whether they expanded into the Caribbean region.They started out rating restaurants in France and gradually expanded into other countries such as the United States, Japan and Italy.Mr Guadiano felt he brought to Bacci special insider's knowledge of Italian cooking that could only be gained from working and living in Italy.“It was about knowing the ingredients and knowing how they produced the ingredients,” he said. “It is very interesting and is something that people on this side of the world often have no idea about.”New items have now appeared on the Bacci menu such as spaghetti alla pescatora, capellini con astice (home-made angel hair pasta, Maine lobster and vine-ripened tomatoes) and chicken cacciatore.However, he said it was a fine balance between creating truly authentic Italian food and pleasing Bermuda customers. “We are in the business of making money,” he said. “That is the main goal, so we have to listen to our guests and adjust to their likes.“I am so happy to share my knowledge of Italian cuisine with the chefs and staff here at Bacci. Everyone here is dedicated to serving genuine Italian dishes to our customers and I am excited to add my own perspective to make it truly special.”