Ristorante Giglio

The plate edited at the pass

The cut is in the editing: Stefano Terigi, chef at Ristorante Giglio in Lucca, keeps Tuscan memory on the plate without letting it settle into imitation. His training at IUAV gave him a formal base in seeing and making, with structure, balance, and intention treated as working tools rather than decoration. That education reads in the cooking as order: a dish arranged so its parts hold together, then pared back until the regional line remains clear.

Before Giglio, Terigi worked as chef at Piazza Duomo in Alba, a kitchen with its own pressure and precision. In Lucca, his station sits inside a three-chef kitchen that revisits the classical Lucchese repertoire through a present-tense hand. He has described the aim plainly: “We want to be able to do the work we love without having to worry about others' standards, focusing on our customers so they can have an informal, accessible, but still top-level culinary experience.” The sentence matters because it names the tension of the room: ease in the service, discipline in the method. The restaurant’s recognition includes a Michelin star in 2019, which it voluntarily returned in 2024 to work with greater freedom.

Lucchese ingredients, cut clean

The kitchen works from Modern Tuscan code, then trims the familiar until the dish lands with less weight and more edge. Farro, Sorano beans, wild boar, and chestnut belong to the local grammar here; Terigi’s work keeps that grammar legible while changing the tempo. The menu includes an à la carte path, a shorter five-course tasting menu, and a longer eight-course tasting menu, with a dedicated vegetarian tasting menu given real standing rather than treated as an aside.

His own signatures point to a method built on contrast: potatoes with squid sauce, chanterelles and spicy parsley; spaghetti with vin jaune and Comtè cheese; stuffed hen’s neck; a sour salad with pumpkin and eel. These are not accumulations. They depend on pressure between earth and sea, fat and acidity, softness and cut. Homemade pasta has a clear place in the program, as does bread, and the wine list runs to approximately seven hundred labels with a strong Tuscan focus. The cellar, like the cooking, stays close to the region without closing the door on reach.

Frescoes above the room

The room sits on the piano nobile of an 18th-century palazzo, where original frescoed ceilings, oak floors, and tall windows hold the service in a slower register. Across the square is the Teatro del Giglio, close enough that the dining room feels part of Lucca’s civic fabric rather than a sealed fine-dining box. Around forty covers are spread through two connected salons, which gives the pass a particular kind of rhythm: enough movement to keep the room alive, enough space for the plates to arrive without theatre.

Service is warm and unhurried, but the softness belongs mostly to the room. The cooking remains exact. Vegetables carry real weight in the repertoire, sweetbreads and eel sit beside pasta and Lucchese staples, and the counterpoint between accessibility and rigor stays visible from first course to last. If the restaurant has stepped away from one form of standard, the work has not loosened. It ends, often enough, with Stefano Terigi’s stuffed hen’s neck.