Vecchia Malcesine

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

The Chef Behind the Name

"I am a person who happens to be a chef. I don't want to be defined by what I do, but by who I am." That sentence, from Leandro Luppi himself, tells you almost everything about Vecchia Malcesine. Born in Alto Adige, Luppi spent a decade working in hotels and restaurants across Italy before opening his first restaurant in Bolzano in 1986. He moved to Lake Garda in 1991, and in 1998 founded Vecchia Malcesine at the precise point where the lake's water meets the rock of Monte Baldo. A Michelin star followed in 2004 — and by his own account, it changed nothing about how he cooks.

Luppi describes himself as chef, painter, and fisherman. The restaurant's interior reflects all three: bottle holders he painted by hand, Murano glasses from the 1950s, a table fashioned from a salvaged antique door, and works by artists including Riccardo Licata, who gifted Luppi a painting after dining here. Nothing is decorative for its own sake; everything carries a personal history.

Where the Lake Meets the Mountain

Malcesine sits at the northern end of Lake Garda, where the water loses its Mediterranean softness and faces the sharp vertical rise of Monte Baldo. Luppi has built his kitchen around this duality — lake fish alongside mountain wild herbs, the gentle olive oil of the Garda shoreline alongside the Garronese Veneta cattle of the Baldo highlands. Every dish is, in his words, a conversation between water and rock.

The Forgotten Fish

"When I began serving freshwater fish, there were probably only two of us doing it in Italy — us and the Serva brothers." That pioneering instinct is still the engine of Vecchia Malcesine. Luppi spent years researching lake varieties that Italian gastronomy had largely abandoned, finding the cooking technique that best honours each one. Wild herbs foraged from Monte Baldo, extra-virgin oil from the Garda groves, and produce from the Veronese hinterland complete a kitchen that speaks, as Luppi puts it, of this precise place and nowhere else.

The current tasting menu — cheekily subtitled keep calm... it's just food — moves through dishes like smoked lavarello with bread and tomato, char with smoked egg, cauliflower with trout caviar and lake sardine hummus, and a burnt onion ravioli with pecorino. A shorter format and a more flexible à-la-carte option are also available, with wine pairings offered by the glass.

Recognition

Gambero Rosso has awarded Vecchia Malcesine two forks, a recognition that sits alongside the long-held Michelin star and confirms what regulars already know: this is one of the most singular addresses on Lake Garda, driven by a chef who has never cooked to please anyone but himself — and who, somehow, pleases everyone.