D'Amore by Italo Bassi

Two chefs holding the same line

Gnocchetti cacio e pepe leaves the pass under Chef Edoardo Menna at D'Amore by Italo Bassi in Bonifacio, with Chef Italo Bassi's pasta-led register behind it. Edoardo Menna has worked at this station since 2023, carrying the executive-chef brief where technique becomes timing, correction, and calm pressure. Italo Bassi, trained at Pellegrino Artusi hospitality school in Riolo Terme, gives the house its name and its discipline: Italian craft built on pasta, risotto, crudo, and the measured use of luxury ingredients rather than weight.

Bassi's formation runs through Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, then through his namesake restaurants in Porto Cervo and Bonifacio. Menna's path came through La Pineta in Marina di Bibbona and Finestra by Italo Bassi, where he also took on an executive-chef role in 2023. At D'Amore, the two roles meet at a different pitch from the upstairs gastronomic room. The work stays closer to the quay, to sharing, to the Italian Riviera idea of the table: bright product, house-made pasta, fish cut cleanly, sauces held lucid.

Crudo, pasta, risotto, restraint

The carte works à la carte, moving through crudos, piatti freddi, piatti caldi, and dolci. The cold side carries local fish with citrus and olive oil, prawn carpaccio with trout roe, beef battuta in millefeuille, focaccia, and fleur de bufala cut at the table against tomato. The hot side turns on the bench work: spaghetti alla chitarra, gnocchetti cacio e pepe, tagliolini with Italian caviar from Pisani Dossi, risotti, and sauces that need enough gloss to coat without covering the grain or the cut.

There is no need to overstate the luxury here. It sits in the choices: Siberian or ossetra caviar with tagliolini, fresh truffle over chitarra, Corsican citrus in profiteroles, arabica espuma over tiramisu. Menna's job is to keep those ingredients from becoming spectacle. Bassi's signature gives the grammar, especially in pasta, where the dish has to arrive with bite, heat, and proportion intact. The wine program is curated around that movement, with service advice meant to meet crudo, cheese, pasta, caviar, and cocoa without pulling the meal off its axis.

The room below the Citadelle

The room sits on the Bonifacio marina quay, below the Citadelle, in a bright register of terracotta clay plaster, arches, vaults, and sun-washed color shaped by atelier Gardera-Pastre. Light off the water reaches the glassware; the counterpoint is the discipline at the pass. The atmosphere is warm rather than hushed, conversational enough for the marina to remain present, refined enough that the plates do not have to compete with the view.

That matters to the cooking. Crudo wants daylight and a clean table. Pasta wants pace. Risotto wants attention that does not announce itself. In this room, Italian Riviera ease is not treated as decoration; it gives Menna and Bassi a tempo for D'Amore, from fleur de bufala to gnocchetti cacio e pepe.