Restaurant in Cavi di Lavagna, Italy
One Michelin star, €€€ pricing, worth booking.
Impronta d'Acqua holds a Michelin star (2024) in the small Ligurian coastal town of Cavi di Lavagna, with €€€ pricing that makes it one of the better-value one-star meals in Italy. Chef Ivan Maniago runs four tasting menus — fish, meat, vegetarian, and offal — all available à la carte, with a no-flame raw fish menu and a fully vegan track. Ranked #440 in OAD's 2025 Europe list. Book well ahead; the restaurant is closed Tuesdays.
Ranked #440 in Opinionated About Dining's 2025 leading restaurants in Europe, Impronta d'Acqua holds a Michelin star (awarded 2024) and sits on the seafront road in Cavi di Lavagna, a small town on the Ligurian Riviera that most international travellers drive straight past on the way to Cinque Terre or Portofino. That's a meaningful setup: a technically serious kitchen, €€€ pricing (lower than the €€€€ tier that most comparable starred Italian restaurants occupy), and a dining room with almost no ambient tourist noise. If you're building a Ligurian itinerary around food rather than beaches, this is the restaurant that belongs on it.
Chef Ivan Maniago runs an open-view kitchen at the rear of a minimalist, open-plan dining room, and the format reflects his priorities: technique is the show, not theatre. The kitchen produces four tasting menus, all of which can also be ordered à la carte, which is a genuinely useful option at this price tier and rare enough at starred level to be worth noting. The menus divide by product focus: fish-forward, meat-focused, a vegetarian menu, and a fourth built around offal (the "quinto quarto" tradition). The fish orientation is the anchor of the kitchen's identity, drawing on the immediate proximity of the Ligurian sea, but the inland and vegetable-origin products receive serious attention rather than token treatment.
The vegetarian offering, called VEGE "TABLE", extends to a fully vegan version under the name VEGAN TABLE. Specific dishes documented in available records include navone cabbage with lard, honey, and rice crispy, and artichoke in double cooking with spicy mayonnaise — technically specific constructions that signal genuine menu development rather than an afterthought vegan track. The Tutto CRUDO menu is the fish-focused option that omits heat entirely: every dish prepared without flame. That kind of structural commitment to a single technique is harder to execute well than multi-method cooking, and it places Maniago in a narrow group of Italian chefs willing to make that constraint the product.
The meat menu's most discussed dish from available documentation is pigeon breast formed into a terrine with pistachios, served alongside a fried pigeon leg. That pairing of classic French-influenced charcuterie technique with Italian product sourcing is consistent with what contemporary Ligurian fine dining does at its most considered: draw on the full range of northern Italian and cross-border techniques without pretending the Alps and the Côte d'Azur don't exist immediately to the north and west.
Impronta d'Acqua is closed Tuesdays. Lunch service runs 12:30–2:30 PM Monday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Dinner runs 8:00–10:00 PM Wednesday through Sunday (Monday also has dinner service). For a restaurant of this calibre with a Google rating of 4.8 across 164 reviews, booking difficulty is rated hard , plan well in advance, particularly for weekend dinner slots, which will be the first to go. No booking method is listed in available data, so check directly via the restaurant's address (SS 1, 2121, 16033 Cavi GE) or search for current reservation platform listings. There is no website or phone number in current records.
The dining room has a minimalist, contemporary feel with the open kitchen visible from the main space. Service is noted as excellent in available documentation. The room sits on the straight coastal road that runs alongside both the seafront and the railway line , the setting is functional rather than dramatic, but the interior makes deliberate use of restraint, which is consistent with the kitchen's approach. For a special occasion dinner, the format works: the à la carte option means you are not locked into a full tasting menu if the group is mixed, and the price tier makes the experience accessible relative to comparably credentialled Italian restaurants in major cities.
For more options in the area, see our full Cavi di Lavagna restaurants guide, as well as hotels, bars, wineries, and experiences in Cavi di Lavagna. For seafood in the same area, Raieü is the other notable option worth comparing.
Impronta d'Acqua's most direct peer group is Italy's one-star coastal and contemporary kitchens rather than the multi-star flagships. Against €€€€ tier operators like Dal Pescatore in Runate or Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, Impronta d'Acqua is the better value choice , one star at €€€ versus two or three stars at €€€€. If the question is purely price-to-quality ratio among starred Italian restaurants, this is a strong entry point. Against Uliassi in Senigallia , the other Italian coastal fine dining benchmark at two Michelin stars , Impronta d'Acqua is less technically complex but more accessible in format and cost, and better suited to diners who want a serious meal without committing to a three-hour tasting arc.
For the full spectrum of Italy's most ambitious kitchens, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Le Calandre in Rubano, Piazza Duomo in Alba, and Reale in Castel di Sangro all represent a higher level of ambition and a higher price tier. Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler in Brunico and Enrico Bartolini in Milan are the two €€€€ creative-Italian comparators with the strongest technical reputations. Neither is a direct substitute for a Ligurian coastal kitchen with this specific product focus, but if you are weighing a single fine dining splurge in Italy, the question is whether you want maximum technical ambition (Modena, Rubano, Milan) or a more specific, place-grounded experience at a lower spend. Impronta d'Acqua makes the strongest case in the second category. For similar Italian Contemporary cooking outside Italy, Agli Amici Rovinj in Rovinj and L'Olivo in Anacapri are the nearest regional comparators worth considering. Quattro Passi in Marina del Cantone is the most direct coastal Italian peer in format and setting.
Book Impronta d'Acqua if you are on the Ligurian coast and want a Michelin-starred meal at a price point that doesn't require the full €€€€ commitment. The à la carte option, the structured vegetarian and vegan menus, and the no-flame Tutto CRUDO track make it a more flexible booking than most tasting-menu-only equivalents. The 4.8 Google rating across 164 reviews is consistent for a kitchen at this level. Book well in advance for weekend dinner; Monday lunch is the most likely slot to open up. Tuesday is the one day to avoid , the restaurant is closed.
| Venue | Price | Booking Difficulty | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Impronta d'Acqua | €€€ | Hard | — |
| Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| Dal Pescatore | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| Enoteca Pinchiorri | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| Enrico Bartolini | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| Le Calandre | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
What to weigh when choosing between Impronta d'Acqua and alternatives.
Yes. The open-view kitchen at the rear gives solo diners something to watch, and the minimalist open-plan room doesn't feel awkward for a table of one. With four tasting menus all available à la carte, you can calibrate the meal to your appetite rather than committing to a full multi-course format. At €€€ pricing, it's a comfortable solo splurge rather than a full-occasion commitment.
The kitchen runs four tasting menus — one vegetarian, two covering fish and meat, and a fourth dedicated to offal (quinto quarto) — and all dishes are also available à la carte. The fish-focused menu reflects the restaurant's core orientation, but the quinto quarto menu is the more distinctive call. The pigeon breast terrine with pistachios and fried pigeon leg is specifically noted as a standout. If you want the full range of chef Ivan Maniago's technique, one of the tasting menu formats will show it better than picking individual dishes.
Yes, at least for vegetarians and vegans. The dedicated vegetarian menu (VEGE 'TABLE') has an explicit vegan version called VEGAN TABLE, with dishes such as Navone Cabbage Lard and Artichoke in double cooking with spicy mayonnaise listed in the venue's own description. For other dietary needs, nothing is documented in available venue data — check the venue's official channels before booking.
Lunch is the easier booking: service runs 12:30–2:30 PM on Monday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, giving you four windows per week versus dinner's five. For a Michelin-starred meal on the Ligurian seafront, a weekend lunch with natural light over the coast is a practical argument in favour of the midday slot. Dinner runs 8:00–10:00 PM Wednesday through Sunday, which suits those arriving from further along the coast in the evening.
The dining room is described as minimalist and contemporary, which in a Ligurian coastal context typically means neat, put-together rather than formal — a jacket is not obligatory, but beach casual would feel out of place at a Michelin-starred table. No dress code is explicitly stated in the venue's documentation, so err on the side of clean and considered rather than strictly formal.
Keep this venue in your Pearl passport, rate it after you visit, and track it alongside every other place you collect.
