Four Hundred Kilometers for a Risotto In Riccione, there’s a restaurant people cross half of Italy for. We went to find out why.
There are restaurants people choose because they happen to be “on the way,” and restaurants that are the destination themselves. Patty in Riccione belongs to the second category. Set practically on the sand within Spiaggia 129, in the Marano area, this restaurant is considered by many the “Mecca” of raw seafood for the freshness of its oysters, langoustines, and red and violet prawns.
But plenty of people swear they’d cross half of Italy just to taste its iconic dish: risotto with red prawns, stracciatella, and strawberries. There are three spaces available to guests: the air-conditioned indoor dining room, the “deck” halfway between the sand and the building, and the whole “beach area,” where you can have lunch or dinner with your feet literally on the shore. Beautiful by day, magical by night. It’s not staging: the sea really is right there, just steps from the tables, and the good food and great wines do the rest. Diego Silvestri took over the restaurant in 2007.
He had worked in the restaurant business for years before that, but his real training came as a boy, in his father’s fish shop. It’s a detail that explains almost everything. At Patty, the star of the show isn’t technique — it’s the sourcing. Diego knows how to recognize good fish because he grew up watching someone select it every morning, and that old-fashioned craft has become the reason some customers — and this is no figure of speech — travel hundreds of kilometers to come back.
The fish counter proudly displays the catch of the day, while the menu always features French oysters, from Brittany and Arcachon, as well as Spanish, Croatian, Irish, and Italian ones. Then there are mantis shrimp, hairy mussels, razor clams, sea walnuts, bluefin tuna, and red and violet prawns from Mazara del Vallo. The catch comes mostly from Sicily and Puglia, with the rest from the Adriatic.
Those wary of raw fish can start with the warm octopus and potato tortino, a classic they make here with rare delicacy. Among the first courses, two dishes in particular have built the place’s reputation. The spaghetti with tuna crudités and grey mullet bottarga, which brings together the freshness of raw fish and the savoriness of bottarga without one overpowering the other. And the risotto with red prawns, stracciatella, and strawberries.
On paper, the strawberry sounds like a gamble; on the plate, it works. All the fresh pasta is made in-house, and it’s pasta from Romagna: tagliatelle, passatelli, strozzapreti. The bread and desserts also come out of their kitchen, with a few openly declared exceptions for certain specialties from Campania and Sicily. Vegetables and fruit come from the local hinterland. The wine list counts around 300 labels, with an obvious soft spot for sparkling wines, both Italian and French, many available in magnum format too.
Which says a lot about the kind of evenings that happen here: big tables of food lovers, or couples who simply refuse to get the location wrong. The kitchen is serious, the raw ingredients are among the best you’ll find on the Riviera, but Patty remains, above all, a happy place. Diego and his wife Erita welcome customers the way you’d welcome guests into your home, and the service is the kind that’s precise without being stiff. Is it worth the trip? Yes — and not just for the fish. It’s worth the trip because it brings together two things that rarely coexist in the same place: the level of a serious, high- end restaurant and the lightness of a dinner on the beach with friends.
