Guido

A self-taught hand on an Adriatic pass

The plate stays spare: fish, heat, restraint. Gianpaolo Raschi is executive chef at Guido in Miramare, Rimini, a self-taught cook with thirty years given to family-style Romagna cooking, whose only formal training was a 100-hour course at Rimini's Palace Hotel. There were no internships and no named mentors; the discipline came from service. His philosophy turns on top-quality Adriatic fish and seafood, treating simple-sounding dishes with refinement and elegance rather than covering them. His brother Gianluca Raschi runs the wine cellar and oversees menus across the family's venues, working closely with sommelier Scilla Guidi.

The lineage is not presented as a list of teachers. It comes through the method. Keep the flavor legible. Let sweetness, bitterness, salinity and texture carry their own weight. Raschi reinterprets local classics, cappelletti with grilled grey mullet in a vinegary broth, spaghetti with oysters emulsified raw, and folds French butter technique and a chive finish drawn from Gualtiero Marchesi into an Italian frame. His own trajectory follows the restaurant's, from beach kiosk heir to a Michelin-starred kitchen since 2008.

Cuttlefish, mantis shrimp, and the measured menu

Guido's program moves between tasting menu and à la carte, with the kitchen's identity most clearly held in its seafood signatures. Cuttlefish cappuccino gives the house its most compact statement: a familiar café form turned toward the sea, with the cuttlefish asked to carry body rather than spectacle, and it has been the recurring hero dish across years of reviews. Canocchia gratin keeps mantis shrimp close to a Romagna memory, while seafood pizza brings a more open, coastal gesture to the table. The cooking is modern, though edited describes it better. The dish may shift shape, yet the reference remains readable. The cellar is curated, and the dining room carries a formal service rhythm, but the center of gravity stays at the pass. Guido holds one Michelin star, including two current-year recognitions and five from the previous year. Those numbers matter less as decoration than as evidence of a house that keeps returning to the same difficult brief: refined Adriatic fish without losing the taste of the shore.

A quiet room inside the beach club shell

The contrast is part of the room's character. Guido sits inside a beach club, yet the atmosphere turns hushed once the work begins. The counterpoint is not theatrical; it is architectural and tonal. Outside, Miramare belongs to sun, sand, and the easy movement of the Rimini coast. Inside, the pass works in a quieter register, with formal service and an intimate room giving the seafood enough space to land. The elegance here does not need distance from the beach. It depends on it. A dish like canocchia gratin carries more force because the Adriatic is not an idea on the menu, it is just beyond the room. The restraint meets that setting cleanly: the plate remembers the coast, then stops before it explains too much.

The craft held in plain sight

Guido matters because it asks a difficult question of luxury: how little can be added before the fish loses its voice. The answer changes by dish, but the discipline is consistent. The kitchen can move from cuttlefish cappuccino to seafood pizza without abandoning the same principle of clarity. If there is a next movement to follow, it is not a slogan or a larger claim. It is the continued adjustment of a regional hand to Guido's Adriatic bench, one plate of cuttlefish cappuccino at a time.