Café Les Paillotes

Section control at the seafood pass

The raw seafood tasting sets the pace for Francesco Nunziata, Chef at Café Les Paillotes in Pescara center, Pescara, Italy, where the pass has to keep delicacy and timing in the same hand. His route to this station began with training at I.P.S.A.R. L. De Medici, then service as commis at La Pergola in Rome from 2006, where repetition and pressure gave the work its grammar. Chef De Partie posts followed at Zirmerhof in 2008 and La Pergola Restaurant from 2009 to 2012, section by section, before sous chef responsibility at The Lanesborough in London in 2013.

He already knew this kitchen before returning to lead it. Nunziata worked as Sous Chef at Cafè Les Paillotes from 2014 to 2016, then later as Executive Chef at Cafè Les Paillotes, Pescara, from 2021 to 2022. The useful line through those appointments is not a résumé flourish; it is control. His cooking has been shaped by formal training, hotel service, section discipline, and executive oversight, with a style that favors precision, balance, and economy of gesture. At a beachfront restaurant built around fish, that restraint matters. The hand must know when to stop.

Raw fish, risotto, and the Adriatic register

Café Les Paillotes works in modern Italian seafood, with à la carte and tasting menu formats built around the Adriatic rather than around display. The raw seafood tasting is the clearest statement of the room: fish handled with enough confidence to leave it exposed, served before the kitchen moves into pasta, risotto, grilling, and frying. Seafood risotto, one of the house signatures, sits in the other register, drawing depth from stock, rice, shellfish, and timing rather than ornament.

The program also gives space to De Cecco pasta preparations, fritto misto, grilled fish, stuffed and fried red mullets, and grilled tuna with sesame. Recent descriptions of the kitchen point to acidity, technique, and leavened products as active concerns, not background polish. The wine program is curated at cellar scale, with around 500 labels noted alongside Italian and international bottles, including organic and biodynamic selections. That matters with this cooking. Raw fish, fried fish, risotto, and sesame-grilled tuna each ask for a different kind of lift, weight, and salt tolerance in the glass.

The room beside the beach

The room keeps a slightly old-fashioned elegance: Moroccan lamps, gilded-frame mirrors, low light, refined table equipment, and the kind of baroque detail the sea view can soften. Café Les Paillotes sits within the Il Lido delle Sirene beach complex at Piazza Le Laudi 2, so the terrace has the Adriatic close enough to change the tempo of service. Inside, the setting reads warmer and richer; outside, the beachside covered terrace opens the plate toward air and water.

Service moves in an upscale casual register, conversational rather than hushed, with the pass holding a modern seafood menu in a classic coastal setting. Still, the work is bench-side: raw seafood kept clean, risotto held to the minute, and the terrace returning every course to the Adriatic.