La Meridiana

A chef at the Ligurian pass

At the pass, Edmondo Segre sets the culinary direction at La Meridiana in Garlenda, where Il Rosmarino carries the resort’s evening work and Anton Blas stands beside him as chef de cuisine. Segre has shaped market-driven Ligurian cooking here for more than four decades, since he and Alessandra Segre established the property in 1983 as a small Relais & Châteaux retreat built around gardens, dining rooms, and a kind of hospitality that depends on timing. That inheritance matters because the kitchen has to work inside a house made as much of pace and reception as of plates. The menus change daily against what arrives, with seafood, pasta, fish and produce carrying the Ligurian line, and the useful lineage is the one the work makes visible: long tenure, wine awareness, operational control, then the pass.

Three choices from the market

Il Rosmarino’s dinner program stays close to Liguria without making the room casual. The kitchen works from a market-led structure, with three choices per course and menus that change daily around fish, seafood, pasta, rice, vegetables, and the produce available to the house. That method gives the plate its limits. Carnaroli rice has appeared with oven-roasted quail, Parmesan, and red wine reduction; lamb loin with white chocolate, lime, and curried eggplant shows the same willingness to move a Ligurian table through a resort register without losing the main ingredient. Bread receives attention as a fundamental, not a garnish. Il Bistrot carries the lighter lunch and snack side of the property, while Il Rosmarino holds the evening station. The wine program belongs to Edmondo Segre’s hand, built over more than 20 years around Italian bottles, including vertical tastings of Solaia, Sassicaia, and Tignanello from 1978 onward.

The room between parquet and garden

The room has parquet underfoot, Persian rugs, porcelain cabinets, candles on the tables, and the hush of a house set back from the Riviera’s busier coast. La Meridiana is small by design, with 26 rooms arranged among gardens, a rock pool, and the neighboring 18-hole Garlenda golf course designed by John Harris in 1960. That scale changes the way dinner feels. The pass works for guests who may have spent the afternoon in the garden or at the course, then arrive at Il Rosmarino expecting Ligurian food carried with formality but not stiffness. The room stays quiet enough for the service gestures to register: a glass set down, bread cut, a plate turned toward the guest.

A house held in small scale

What endures at La Meridiana is not a single signature dish or a public count of the cellar. It is the repeated decision to keep the property intimate, the menus changeable, and the wine list Italian in its center of gravity. The kitchen works inside that frame, with the Segre house still defined by Il Rosmarino, Il Bistrot, the gardens, and the long memory of Solaia, Sassicaia, and Tignanello.