Da O Batti

Scampi handled hot at the table

The scampi arrive hot enough to slow the hands; at Da O Batti in Portofino, the room is built around that gesture. Diners shell the prawns themselves, leaning over the guazzetto, keeping bread close for the sauce that has carried the restaurant’s name beyond its narrow vico. The house is family-run, and the room is orchestrated by its owners, Cristina and Vanda, with the kitchen kept deliberately out of the spotlight. At Da O Batti, the culture is Ligurian and maritime: pesto, day-fresh fish, seafood risotto, grilled and baked sea bass, anchovies, clams, octopus, and the house scampi. The restaurant itself predates the present family ownership, and the scampi recipe passed from Old Batti to the current family owners about 40 years ago. Nobody here needs to make that inheritance louder. The pass has enough to do: keep the sauce hot, the fish clear, the pesto green, and the hands moving.

A guazzetto kept in the family

The method that defines Da O Batti is not published as a formula. The house calls the scampi an ancient and secret recipe, and the cooking holds to the structure of a guazzetto, a stew that clings to shell and finger rather than sitting politely beside the fish. The recipe has remained unchanged for 47 years; at the table, the shelling happens while the prawns are still hot. That timing matters. The dish asks for touch, not ceremony. Around it, the à la carte menu stays close to the Ligurian bench: trenette or mandilli with Genovese pesto, potatoes and green beans in the pasta tradition, risotto with scampi, spaghetti with clams, fresh octopus with homemade pesto, fried anchovies, vegetable pie, focaccia, marinated swordfish, and sea bass cooked with restraint. The wine program is curated to sit beside seafood rather than dominate it, with local bottles doing much of the quiet work. Limoncello often closes the meal, a small cold punctuation after salt, garlic, parsley, basil, and shell.

The room off Vico Nuovo

The room is away from the main square, in the old town fabric of Vico Nuovo 17, where Portofino narrows before it opens again. Da O Batti trades a sea view for proximity to its own history. The space has gathered layers over roughly 40 years of family stewardship: added rooms, teak steps, crystal panes, backlit sailing ship models, fisherman-style tablecloths, and walls carrying photographs of owners beside well-known guests. None of it feels like a set. The room is small, warm, and conversational, with sea memorabilia doing what it should do in a coastal restaurant, reminding the table where the food began. There is an outdoor yard shaded by trees, and inside, the light stays low enough for the sauce to be the brightest thing on the table. The pass serves a dining room that wants comfort, but the cooking still has to answer to shellfish.

What remains in the sauce

Da O Batti matters because it has kept one local dish in active service while Portofino changed around it. The village’s color, boats, and piazzetta may draw the first gaze, but this restaurant asks the hand to finish the work. Shell, bread, bowl, sauce. The precise test the house sets itself, service after service, is Scampi alla O Batti.