Lazzaro 1915 dell'Albergo Trieste

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Family Table, More Than a Century in the Making

Lazzaro 1915 is not simply a restaurant name — it is a family chronicle. In the municipal records of Pontelongo, a small town in the Venetian lowlands near Padua, the story begins with Lazzaro Siviero and his wife Elena, refugees from Trieste who arrived before 1915 and transformed a modest local tavern into a proper trattoria. They named it "Alla città di Trieste" as a tribute to the Istrian city that had shaped them. Over the following decades, through two world wars, remarriages, early deaths and generous aunts who stepped in to keep the kitchen fires lit, the Siviero family held on. By 1965, brothers Giovanni and Paolo had renovated the building into a full hotel-restaurant bearing the sign "Albergo Ristorante Trieste." The name Lazzaro 1915 was added later — a deliberate homage to the founder.

Piergiorgio and Daniela: Tradition Carried Forward

The current chapter belongs to Piergiorgio Siviero and his sister Daniela. Piergiorgio's path to the family stove was anything but direct. After graduating from the Hospitality Institute in Adria in 1999, he cooked in St. Moritz at the Kulm and Badrutt's Palace, worked under Aimo Moroni at the two-Michelin-starred Luogo di Aimo e Nadia in Milan, and then moved to Paris to train under Alain Ducasse — progressing from chef de partie at Il Cortile to the kitchen of Jean-François Piège at the Plaza Athénée, and finally to Frank Cerruti at the three-starred Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo. In mid-2005, he returned to Pontelongo to continue what his grandfather had started.

In the dining room, Daniela brings the same seriousness to hospitality: a well-ordered sala, considered wine pairings, and what the restaurant simply describes as "a genuine smile." Together, they represent the latest generation of a lineage that includes aunt Dilva — described as the restaurant's "culinary memory" — who has been the keeper of the kitchen's historical identity for decades.

Gambero Rosso recognised this continuity and craft with 2 Forks, a mark of quality that reflects the kitchen's consistent ambition.

Campagna Liquida: The Land, Dissolved into Cooking

The current menu carries the evocative title Campagna Liquida — "liquid countryside" — and the idea behind it is precise: the land that surrounds Pontelongo, its traditions and ingredients, dissolved into their most essential form and then rebuilt as contemporary fine dining. Dishes from the à la carte menu include a scallop from Chioggia with coral mayonnaise and bone marrow gratin, spaghettone with cuttlefish and its liver prepared alla veneziana with black garlic, and white asparagus from Conche with egg yolk macerated in acquavite. A fillet of horse alla Bismarck with banana in bagna caoda shows the kitchen's confidence with less conventional ingredients.

The tasting menu, called DNA, distills the same philosophy into a tighter sequence — from brioche with plum and cumin through to carnaroli rice with Marcesina aged cheese, mussels and porcini, closing with a millefeuille of green coffee cream, cardamom and miso caramel. It is available at €130, or €190 with five wine pairings and a cocktail.

For weekday lunches, there is the A Gianni menu — named for uncle Gianni, "the man of lunch" — a three-course format served in thirty minutes at €30, available Thursday, Friday and Monday.

The Wine List as Living Document

The wine list at Lazzaro 1915 is treated as something accumulated over time rather than assembled: each pairing noted, each discovery recorded. It is, in the restaurant's own words, "more than a tool — a story."

What Lazzaro Siviero started in a small Venetian village over a hundred years ago has become a fine dining address where family memory and serious culinary training are inseparable from each other — and from the flat, river-crossed landscape that feeds the kitchen.