ROME, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Like many young people growing up in Sardinia, Davide Sanna loved Italian cuisine and wanted to have a successful career as a chef.

For the past year, the 25-year-old has cooked at Piccola Cucina, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s glitzy SoHo district, home to designer boutiques and high-end art galleries.

Italy’s food is famous the world over but many talented young chefs, hoping to make a career in their country, find themselves frustrated by low pay, lack of labour protection and scant prospects.

Roberto Gentile, a 25-year-old chef from Sicily, has worked for the last two years cooking French food at Le Suquet, a two-star-Michelin restaurant near Toulouse, after previous jobs in Britain and Spain.

But the ratio of new restaurants opening to existing ones closing has been negative for each of the last six years in Italy, according to the sector’s business lobby FIPE, amid high taxes, endless red tape and the difficult economic backdrop.

Fifty-year-old Francesco Mazzei trained as a chef in his home region of Calabria in Italy’s southern toe, and then in Rome, before leaving 27 years ago for London where he arrived “without even money for cigarettes.”

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