Caesar Augustus

A chef held to one address

The line at Caesar Augustus in Anacapri is where Colin Henderson , Chef, measures his work against service, season, and the cliff. His public profile is spare: a Canadian chef serving as Executive Chef at Caesar Augustus, in Anacapri, Italy. That restraint matters here. What remains is the clean responsibility of the station, the daily discipline of a kitchen set inside a hotel whose own history carries weight.

The property began in the mid-1800s as Villa Bitter, built by a wealthy German gentleman for early travelers climbing the Phoenician Steps toward Anacapri. In 1875, Russian Prince Emmanuel Bulhak acquired the clifftop residence and made it his panoramic island home. By the 1940s it had become a hotel, and since 1995 the Signorini family has managed the house in its third generation. Henderson’s role sits inside that continuity: not as decoration, but as the working credit behind the pass at a restaurant shaped by formal service, local sourcing, and the particular expectations of a Relais & Châteaux address.

Zero mile at the terrace pass

La Terrazza di Lucullo works from a Southern Italian register, with à la carte and tasting menus built around the island rather than imported drama. The hotel describes a zero-mile approach, and the kitchen has the advantage of its own garden for herbs and vegetables, alongside fish from the bay. Those facts set the discipline. A dish can carry the room only if the produce can carry the dish.

The format allows Henderson’s kitchen to move between composed courses and the more direct appetite of the terrace: seafood, garden leaves, Caprese references, raw preparations at the Infinity Terrace Bar. The method published by the house is less about named techniques than about sourcing radius and restraint. That is useful information in itself. On Capri, where spectacle is never in short supply, the kitchen’s task is to keep the plate in proportion to the view, to let tomatoes, herbs, fish, oil, and heat do their work without turning the pass into theatre.

The room above the Bay of Naples

The restaurant’s room is a terrace before it is anything else. It sits on a 300-meter cliff, with the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius held in the sightline, and the room changes as the light moves across the water. Service stays formal, the atmosphere quiet, the tables small enough in feeling that the edge of the cliff remains present rather than scenic wallpaper.

Around the restaurant, the house keeps the language of a Roman villa: arches, columns, an Augustus statue replica looking out toward the gulf. The broader hotel holds 56 romantic rooms and suites, many with sea views, while subtropical gardens and an infinity pool extend the same cliffside grammar. In Anacapri, away from the Piazzetta’s sharper current, the counterpoint is calm. Henderson’s kitchen works inside that calm, with the pass facing not a blank dining room but La Terrazza di Lucullo and Vesuvius beyond it.