Varese is the sort of Lombard town folks motor past on their way to Milan, but among the culinary landscape of northern Italy, it quietly punches above its weight. And maybe that is why Chef Luca Marinelli, born there four decades ago, never learned to coast. He remembers Sundays: his mother rolling biscotti while the radio crackled, friends drifting in from backyard football matches for sweet, flour-dusted halftime. “I am not good at books, or boring mathematics or things like that,” he admits. “But a hot oven? That made sense.”

Learning the ins and outs of the kitchen alongside his mother eventually led him to culinary school, one pipeline out of small-town ennui. He studied under Gualtiero Marchesi, Italy’s culinary maestro, at the prestigious ALMA S.R.L Scuola Internazionale Di Cucina Italiana and found himself on the line beside the legendary Mauro Uliassi, whose beachside two-star, now three-star, Uliassi, is as unforgiving as the Adriatic wind. Marinelli filleted sea bass until salt crept into his veins, and when the service lights dimmed, he biked the promenade, tasting sea air and freedom. He was twenty-one and already hunting the next frontier.

Stints followed—Savini in Milan’s Galleria; Circeo’s Il Tordo Matto; Spain’s Cenador de Amós—each place sanding the edges off his ambition and sharpening the blade underneath. Yet it was Hong Kong, a neon reef of morning seafood markets and late-night dining stalls, that called to him in 2010. “I thought I was coming for a season,” he laughs, “and now it’s fifteen years.” Ask him what kept him here and he will gesture toward his young protégé, Chef Gabe, knife flickering like a metronome behind the bar of the soon-to-open Salon Des Refusés. “I’ve been doing this job since I was fifteen myself,” he says. “He reminds me why.”

Salon Des Refusés, opening this July on Bridges Street, reads like a long-overdue sonnet—first, to the long roads between Milan and Marseille he rode with his parents as a wheezing asthmatic kid seeking clean air by the shore. To his mentor, Uliassi, who taught him that pristine seafood needs little more than sea and sunlight to shine. To Cuisine du Soleil, Chef Roger Vergé’s Provençal “Cuisine of the Sun”, stripped of nostalgia’s varnish: anchovies drizzled under oil, langoustines flirting with porcini, bluefin carpaccio stung by Calabrian chilli. But also, to something deeper. Something more personal.

He will tell you how for fans of Cezanne and Manet, Salon Des Refusés in name offers a wink toward history’s rejected artists, those castoffs of the Paris art school who went on to become legendary in spite of—or perhaps, because of—the rejections. Chefs have a way of internalising those rejections, maybe more than most, but for Chef Luca, it is a taste he has learned to savour. “You fall in love with the no’s,” he says, “because they keep you hungry.”

The candlelight flickers, casting shadows and valleys across a face that has seen its fair share of them along the way. The particulars fade: the star that slipped, the offer that vanished, the review that nicked too close to bone. Yet his eyes still twinkle—bright, conspiratorial, with a mischievous grin to match—as if he has just been dealt one more hand and likes the odds.

In the quiet after service, when the last glass catches the bar light, you realise the room itself is a hymn to repetition and resolve. Get knocked down, get back in line, ask the sea another question.