Our Daily Show Interview! Gianni Colucci: EXO Lounge- Not just a Place, an Experience!
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EDWARDSVILLE - EXO Lounge isn’t just a nail bar, med spa and cocktail lounge; it’s an experience.
Gianni Colucci, EXO’s Michelin-star Director of Culinary, invites the community to come out and try the new menu at EXO, which opened at 2 157 Center in Edwardsville in 2024. Colucci explained that he was working in Switzerland when he received a call from EXO owner Gina Gamblin with an offer he couldn’t pass up.
“With this kind of energy, this kind of power, she went through the dream she had. She was really impressive about the dream and made me believe in the dream,” Colucci remembered. “I joined her and we started to go through the blueprint. So of course it is a beautiful experience, because we built everything from scratch.”
As Gamblin built up EXO’s brand, Colucci knew he was in the right place. He had worked with similar companies that shared EXO’s “luxury flair,” and he loves creating menus around these concepts.
He worked with Gamblin to develop EXO’s fusion menu, with Asian influences and options that range from quiche to charcuterie. He joked that he recently visited Nashville and discovered that his Nashville hot chicken sliders are better than those found in Tennessee. Colucci encourages everyone to stop by the lounge and try his food for themselves.
“As a cook, what you like is to cook good food and make people happy,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s caviar or if it’s just a piece of turkey. The important thing is when the guests taste it and say, ‘Oh, that is the best thing I’ve put in my mouth.’”
EXO is a luxury brand, and Colucci compares it to a location one would find in Las Vegas, brought home to Edwardsville. But he emphasizes that everything at EXO is affordable. When building the brand, Gamblin, Colucci and their collaborators agreed that affordability was key.
“That was the idea since the beginning. We have a luxury environment, luxury building, but affordable for everybody,” Colucci explained. “That is the goal, because we don’t want to have an empty space. We want to have a full space. We want to have people happy, people enjoy the time. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rich guy or if you are not. The point is that we want to make it affordable for everybody to enjoy and everybody to have a great experience.”
As EXO has grown, Colucci is proud to watch it expand. He believes this is just the beginning of EXO, and he can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
He noted that it wouldn’t be possible without the collaboration between the nail bar, med spa and cocktail lounge and all the team members who have worked hard over the past few months to bring EXO to Edwardsville.
“We are talking about a brand that is growing, a brand that’s going to have a huge way to go, but we are looking always for talent that wants to work with us,” Colucci added. “We want to be better and better and better, and we work for that. We have a beautiful team. We have people that work 24/7 to make this dream come true…We work together and achieve the beautiful goal together.”
For more information about EXO, check out their official website at VisitEXO.com.
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