Consider how Osteria Francescana got its first Michelin star. Bottura opened his restaurant in 1995, and the early days were anxious; customers were scarce and critics were dismissive. In 2001, one of Italy’s most prominent food writers happened to get stuck in bad traffic between Milan and Rome and he stopped in for a meal. A rave review followed and within a year the restaurant had its first star. (It now has three.)

Consider, too, Bottura’s virtuoso improvisations in the kitchen, so rich with the unexpected and the element of surprise. In the same way a jazz musician lets the present moment tell him where he ought to go, Bottura rambles — purposefully — and then reacts. But unlike the Swiss-clockwork kitchen at, say, New York City’s esteemed Eleven Madison Park, where a photograph of Miles Davis looms as inspiration but the room itself remains as silent as a monastery, there is at Osteria Francescana a constant — and conscious — flow of clutter and funk: chefs in loose conversation, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” blaring from speakers on one side of the alley and the Band’s “The Weight” blaring from the other. “It’s my energy,” Bottura explains. “We cannot live without music, without art.”

Should you visit his home, which he shares with Gilmore and one of their two children (the other is in college), it is a safe bet that he will brandish old 78s of classic jazz — Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday. Bottura spent a short time cooking in New York in the early 1990s, and he plays his records on a vintage hand-cranked Victrola that he bought for $150 on the streets of SoHo. “When you are obsessed, really obsessed ...” he says, then trails off.

When Bottura talks about chefs having “a very important sense of responsibility,” he means it. If his cooking is a reflection of what lies inward, his personal mission has been moving in the opposite direction: outward. Revolution is on Bottura’s mind, and not only when it comes to upending the rules of gastronomy. In August, during the Olympics, he opened his Refettorio Gastromotiva in Rio de Janeiro, an ambitious project that involves enlisting talented chefs to turn food waste into delicious and nutritional meals for the poor.

Thirty years ago, a chef’s platform pretty much began and ended with the proper way to truss a chicken. Now, thanks to the explosion of fascination with all things food, star chefs like Bottura have seized the opportunity to convert fame into lasting impact, both social and environmental. René Redzepi, of Noma in Copenhagen, regularly summons the gastro-throng to the MAD Symposium, where attendees are exposed to current thinking on the issues of the day. Tom Colicchio, Dan Barber, Daniel Patterson, Roy Choi and Michel Nischan are all actively engaged with fighting hunger, promoting food education and spreading ideas of sustainability.

“Feed the planet. Feed the planet. Energy for life,” is Bottura’s mantra. And with Rio’s Refettorio (or dining hall, with antecedents in Milan and Bologna, and a dreamed-of future sibling in the Bronx), he is taking on world hunger in a classically Bottura-ish way. The key to the whole enterprise, he says, is “beauty. Through the beauty you can rebuild the soul.”