Paolo e Barbara

The bread starts before the pass

Paolo Masieri folds natural-yeast bread into the rhythm of service as chef at Paolo e Barbara in Sanremo, Italy, before the fish reaches the pass. Paolo Masieri works from Western Liguria as a discipline, not a theme: sea produce, garden vegetables, olive oil, eggs, and the taste of the coast held close enough that the plate does not need to announce it. The restaurant opened in 1987 as a family operation, continuing a tradition begun by his father, and Masieri’s station has remained tied to the same argument since then, that the product should set the terms. His own words are exact about the bread: “I strictly use a 10-years old natural yeast and the flours of ancient grains selected by Janas, a small producer in the Umbria region”, stone milled and organic. The priorities are plain in that order: starter, grain, milling, provenance. The cooking follows the same line. Cappelletti with San Remo crayfish, prebuggiun raviolini with walnut pesto, and poached egg with sea urchins are not departures from the region; they are ways of tightening its focus.

Raw fish, garden beans, ancient grain

The kitchen’s modern Ligurian register was shaped in the early 1990s, when Masieri began working with Mediterranean raw fish preparations inside a cuisine still anchored by regional recipes. The menu moves between shore and field: Sanremo prawns flambéed with Islay Whisky, glazed rock octopus with garden beans, pansoti with squid ink and artichokes, Ponente fish soup, and seared tuna with sweet-and-sour aubergine caponata. A seven-course tasting menu is part of the restaurant’s structure, but the real architecture is ingredient sequence: brine, green bitterness, walnut, shellfish sweetness, the soft weight of egg, the clean acidity that keeps seafood from feeling dressed up. The kitchen gardens matter here because they are not a decorative claim. They supply eggs, olive oil, vegetables, and a small amount of house wine, drawing the restaurant’s craft back to San Sebastiano farm near Sanremo. The Michelin star held by Paolo e Barbara dates to 1990, with one star in the 2026 Guide.

A quiet room around the plates

The room is intimate and quietly refined, with soft lighting, comfortable tables, and the kind of relaxed formality that keeps attention on the plates and wines. Service moves at the pace of tasting-menu dining, measured enough for the sequence to land without becoming ceremonial. At the counter between kitchen and room, the place feels less like a display of technique than a family-tuned system: bread, seafood, garden produce, wine, and the pass each doing its part. The wine program keeps close to that structure, with Ligurian bottles and regional Italian selections set against the seafood-led menu, while natural and biodynamic wines sit in the cellar for courses that need more edge or age. Nothing in the room fights the food. The cappelletti with San Remo crayfish still holds the room.