THE RESTAURANT
A jewel set in a place of poetry and wonder. The Riviera Restaurant is a mouth-watering refuge a few yards from the shore of Lake Garda. It is located inside a splendid house with a centuries-old history that has regained its warmth and light.
Embraced by a scented garden of wild herbs, its cuisine is waiting to be discovered.
THE CUISINE
A cuisine in which chef Francesco Sodano’s marine background meets Lake Garda, the tastes of the land and the aromatic herbs of the garden.
It reinterprets and stands in dialogue with the great classics of the summer holidays, those dishes that have the aroma of salt spray and sea breeze.
THE CHEF
Francesco Sodano was born in Somma Vesuviana in 1988. He gained gastronomic experience at many stellar kitchens, including the Faro di Capo d’Orso in Maiori on the Amalfi coast, where he was head chef. He studied under Oliver Glowig and Anthony Genovese.
At the one Michelin star Famiglia Rana Restaurant in Vallese di Oppeano not far from Verona, he experimented incessantly with avant-garde cuisine and endless research but here, at the Riviera restaurant, he offers a menu that is always original but closer to the Mediterranean “tradition”, with a special tribute to dishes of the Italian gastronomic tradition, interpreted with his usual creative approach.
THE SPACES
There are two interior rooms with eight blue marble tables that recall ocean waves, milky-coloured walls and a hexagonal handmade terracotta floor painted in an unrepeatable warm amaranth hue. An elegant and harmonious place.
The Riviera Restaurant’s third room is a glass patio flooded with light. It accommodates twelve marble tables with the colour of earth and the fresh grass and plants all around bestow a sensation of peace and wellbeing.
It is located alongside a garden of herbs and flowers, surrounded by a sixteenth-century wall of exposed bricks, that recalls a locus amoenus in Arcadia, a medieval enclosed garden, the Garden of Eden.