Grand Hotel Tremezzo restaurants: Marchesi’s terrace, L’Escale, Da Giacomo al Lago, hours and prices

La Terrazza Gualtiero Marchesi is the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant. Marchesi was the first chef in Italy to hold 3 Michelin stars, and the hotel says this is the only restaurant in the world serving his most famous dishes: the Dripping di pesce, a tribute to Jackson Pollock; Riso, oro e zafferano; the Raviolo aperto with scallops; Il rosso e il nero, monkfish in squid ink. The executive chef, Osvaldo Presazzi, worked beside him. Tables are laid on a terrace over the lake, by candlelight; dinner is the only service, from 7.30pm to 10.30pm, and the dress code is one word, elegant.

The menu prints a year beside almost every dish. Riso, oro e zafferano is dated 1981 and costs €62; the Raviolo aperto, 1982, €60; the Dripping di pesce, 2004, €58; the fillet alla Rossini in his manner, 1990, €74. Starters run from €54 to €90, and caviar is sold by the gram. 2 tasting menus draw on the same repertoire: 4 courses at €240 a person, with wines for a further €130, or 5 courses at €280, with wines at €150. Beef Wellington and turbot baked in a bread crust are served for 2, at €94 and €88 a person.

L’Escale Trattoria & Wine Bar is the everyday table, in the hotel’s converted wine cellar: vaulted ceilings inside, a veranda looking to Bellagio outside, and a bar with a long window on the lake where you can also eat. It is the place for the lake’s own cooking. The menu has a section of Lake Como dishes, with rice in cagnone, dressed with butter, sage and Parmesan and served with perch fillets, at €46, and whitefish, lavarello, with butter and sage at €42. A veal cutlet alla milanese is €46, spaghettoni alla carbonara €38, and the fiorentina for 2 is charged by weight, €18 per 100g. Tartare, tagliolini with cacio, pepe and black truffle, and the tiramisù are prepared at the table. The cellar lists more than 1,300 bottles, every one Italian.

Da Giacomo al Lago sits down at the lido. It is the lakeside outpost of Giacomo Milano, the Milanese seafood house, opened here in 2021, and it works outdoors: lunch from noon to 4pm, dinner from 7pm to 10pm between May and September, always subject to the weather. On the dinner menu the plate of raw seafood, with red prawns, Mazara langoustines, oysters and 2 tartares, is €74; spaghetti with clams €44; linguine with lobster €52; oysters €12 each. The catch of the day is priced by the kilo, €150 or €170 according to the fish, and cooked 4 ways, one of them baked in a salt crust.

T Pizza stands beside the Flowers Pool in the garden, with a wood-burning oven and pizzaioli trained in Naples; the classic pizzas on its menu are priced from €26 to €34, and there are salads, smoothies and a vitello tonnato. T Bar, in the palace, is open from 10am to 1am: lunch until 4pm, light bites until 7pm, dinner from 8pm. Its lunch menu suggests a cocktail with almost every dish: a GHT Fashioned with the tuna tartare, a GHT Summer Negroni with the beef one. In the evening the terrace is lit by more than 500 candles, and a pianist plays indoors every night.

Guests’ accounts differ by table. A guest in July 2026 called a 5-course dinner at La Terrazza beautifully presented, with wines that suited each plate; another, writing in June 2026 of «the fine dining experience», waited more than 15 to 20 minutes between courses and left before the end. One who stayed a week in August 2026 ate at Da Giacomo 4 times and praised the oysters above all. On the pizza the verdicts split 3 ways that summer: one of the best a July guest had eaten, underwhelming for the price to an August guest, and «below mediocre» to a visitor who ordered 3. A September 2026 guest found the restaurants excellent and very expensive, and all of them within earshot of the busy road.

At Villa d’Este, in Cernobbio, the Veranda, in the Cardinal’s Building, has retractable glass walls that stay open in summer and a view of the lake, the gardens and the Mosaic; the Grill, a short walk from the Queen’s Pavilion, turns to grilled meat and seafood and serves dinner in the garden in the summer months. A third table, Il Platano, mixes Mediterranean and Japanese cooking on a lakeside terrace.

Passalacqua works the other way round: one kitchen, under the chef Viviana Varese, and many places to sit. Dinner is on the candlelit terrace or in the frescoed Sala Ovale; lunch may be at the pool bar, on the bar terrace, at a table set up in the garden or packed as a hamper for a boat.