La Veranda - Villa d’Este

Dough before the lake comes into view

Pasta and ravioli are made by hand each day before service; Michele Zambanini, Chef at La Veranda - Villa d’Este in Cernobbio, keeps that bench work close to the center of the kitchen. Since 2011, he has been Executive Chef of Villa d’Este, and his remit now reaches across the Villa d’Este Group while he runs the formal dining room inside the Cernobbio house. The role came with a predecessor of unusual duration: Luciano Parolari led the Villa d’Este kitchen for 45 years, including the top position from 1978 until retirement, before Zambanini, then sous chef, took the mantle. That continuity matters here. La Veranda is not a room built around reinvention. It is a classical Italian program, product-led and exacting, with seafood, pasta and rice carrying much of the kitchen’s grammar. Zambanini’s cooking holds to Italian tradition while allowing modern kitchen methods where they protect texture and flavour. The gesture is not theatrical. It is the daily return to dough, filling, fish, rice and temperature, with the house’s long memory pressing quietly on the pass.

Handmade ravioli and fish held in line

The method begins with raw materials, then asks technique to stay in service of them. Pasta and ravioli are prepared strictly by hand every day, a discipline that sets the pace for the brigade before the dining room fills. Seafood receives the same restraint. Zambanini’s work at La Veranda has been noted for its strength with fish, including risotto with borage, perch and black garlic, where the rice carries herbaceous green material, lake fish and the dark sweetness of fermented garlic without losing structure. The menu can move from foie gras escalope to lobster spaghetti, from ravioli to Dover sole with lemon, yet the thread remains classical rather than experimental. Off the printed menu, the kitchen also creates ad hoc dishes for vegetarian, vegan, coeliac and other intolerance-friendly needs, keeping those requests inside the same formal discipline rather than treating them as a separate track. Recognition has followed the restaurant rather than changing its language: La Veranda - Villa d’Este received a Michelin Plate in 2025, and Opinionated About Dining placed it within its Classical in Europe ranking in 2024.

The room facing Lake Como

The room frames the work with old-world formality: glass, linen, candlelight, garden sightlines and Lake Como beyond the terrace. La Veranda is the main formal dining room of Villa d’Este, a hotel whose Cardinal’s Building dates to 1568 and whose life as a hotel began in 1873. On warm evenings, the large glassed-in patio can open toward the terrace as automated windows lower into the ground, shifting the service from enclosed elegance to lake air without changing the cadence at the table. The noise stays low. The pass carries the pace. Dishes cross from kitchen to room with the restraint expected of a house built on ceremony rather than novelty, and the view does not need to be made into a performance. It is already there, behind the ravioli, the perch and the glass.

A classical line kept current

What gives La Veranda its weight is not a break from the past, but the controlled way Zambanini keeps that past useful. Parolari’s long tenure set the standard for traditional Italian haute cuisine at this address; Zambanini’s station now holds seafood, handmade pasta and ad hoc accommodation inside the same house grammar. If the kitchen’s next movement is quiet, that is consistent with the room. The measure remains the daily ravioli at Villa d’Este.