Nove

A Working Garden as the Kitchen's Foundation

Along the western Ligurian coast, where restaurants tend to anchor their identity in the sea, Nove takes a different position. The kitchen at Villa della Pergola draws its primary reference point not from the harbour below but from the soil directly on the property. Chef Kazuo Harada has oriented the restaurant's creative menu around the Orto Rampante, the estate's biodynamic kitchen garden, and around the broader agricultural philosophy that comes with working land you can walk across before service. The result is a Michelin-starred table where the provenance of ingredients is not a marketing statement but a structural fact of how the menu is assembled each season.

This approach places Nove within a specific subset of Italian fine dining that has gained considerable traction over the past decade. Restaurants such as Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler in Brunico and Reale in Castel di Sangro have demonstrated that creative, ingredient-led cuisine rooted in a specific territory can earn sustained critical recognition. At the €€€€ price tier, guests at Nove are paying for a kitchen that must respond daily to what the garden and local suppliers can actually provide, rather than one that works backwards from a fixed repertoire. The vegetarian tasting menu, Naturalia, makes that dependency explicit: it is a pure-plant format built entirely on what the estate's growing cycle allows.

The Estate Setting and What It Demands of a Visit

Villa della Pergola is a historic residence set within a botanical park above Alassio, accessed via a series of tight hairpin turns that effectively filter the casual from the committed. The drive itself is part of the experience's framing: the villa sits at a remove from the town below, and the effort of reaching it reinforces the sense of arrival at something distinct from the Riviera's seafront dining circuit. The botanical park surrounding the property is open to visitors by appointment and for a fee, so the grounds function as both a working agricultural resource and a curated landscape in their own right.

The terrace at Nove is the point where the setting becomes genuinely difficult to replicate. The balcony overlooks the Ligurian Sea, which opens to the horizon in a wide, unobstructed panorama. When weather permits, dinner on the terrace operates as a combination of gastronomy and spectacle that few properties on this stretch of coastline can match at the same price point. The villa also offers hotel accommodation, meaning the full proposition for a dedicated visitor is a stay within the estate rather than a return drive down the hill after the meal.

How Nove Sits Within Ligurian Fine Dining

Liguria does not produce Michelin stars at the density of Piedmont or Lombardy, which makes the recognition Nove received in the 2025 guide more significant in local terms. The region's culinary identity has historically centred on simplicity: pesto, farinata, trofie with seasonal sauces, seafood treated with restraint. That tradition is not absent from Nove's kitchen, but the restaurant operates in a register that lifts local ingredients into a creative format rather than preserving them in their most familiar expression.

The comparison with nearby Ligurian tables at similar ambition levels is instructive. Vescovado in Noli and Bagatto in Loano represent the broader Riviera di Ponente dining scene, while Lamberti in Alassio anchors the seafood tradition in the town itself. Nove occupies a different register entirely: it is the only address in the immediate area operating at starred level, which means the competitive reference points are regional rather than local. At the €€€€ tier, it prices against tables like Quattro Passi in Marina del Cantone on the Amalfi coast or Uliassi in Senigallia on the Adriatic, not against Alassio's broader restaurant offering.

Within Italy's wider constellation of creative fine dining, the Heinz Beck connection places Romano in a lineage that values technical precision alongside ingredient clarity. Beck's approach at La Pergola has long emphasised a discipline around product quality that his alumni tend to carry forward. How that translates to a coastal estate kitchen working from a biodynamic garden is what makes Nove a specific and considered project rather than simply a prestigious address. Other starred Italian tables with strong ingredient-sourcing philosophies, including Piazza Duomo in Alba and Dal Pescatore in Runate, show how durably this approach can sustain recognition over time.

The Glazed Sweetbreads and the Menu's Range

The Michelin commentary for Nove specifically notes glazed veal sweetbreads with paprika, artichokes, black chickpea hummus, and lime from the garden as a dish that illustrates the kitchen's range. It is worth reading carefully: the combination of offal technique, North African-influenced legume preparation, and a citrus element grown on the property is not a regional Ligurian formula. It is a dish that uses local material as ingredient architecture rather than as cultural homage. That distinction separates Nove's creative category from more straightforwardly regional Italian tables such as Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence or Le Calandre in Rubano, where the kitchen's dialogue with tradition operates differently.

The Naturalia menu represents the more radical expression of the kitchen's garden-first philosophy. A fully plant-based tasting menu at starred level requires the kitchen to treat vegetables as primary structure rather than accompaniment, a discipline that demands both technical range and genuine seasonal fluency. For guests who want to experience the estate's agricultural identity most directly, this is the more revealing choice.

What People Recommend at Nove

Guests consistently point to the terrace setting and the kitchen's use of estate-grown produce as the defining elements of a meal here. The glazed veal sweetbreads are the specific dish cited in the Michelin guide's own commentary, which serves as the closest thing to a verifiable recommendation from a named authority. The Naturalia plant menu draws particular attention as an expression of the kitchen's garden-driven approach under Chef Antonio Romano, whose training under Heinz Beck provides the technical foundation for a menu that moves between creative modern cooking and biodynamic sourcing. The 2025 Michelin star is the clearest single signal of the kitchen's current form, and at a Google rating of 4.7 across 140 reviews, the guest experience outside the guide appears to track with the critical assessment.