One of Italy's most famous seafood restaurants changes location and goes out to sea

With its third move, Da Lucio continues to grow and loses the Trattoria denomination, marking a change of status and perspective, without changing direction. Building a new, more responsible dialogue with the sea and the territory has always been the starting point and the goal of a path that has chosen less traveled roads, sometimes unpopular ones. This time the transition is to literally push into the middle of the sea, at the Rimini Docks, "the most iconic place on the Romagna coast," says chef Jacopo Ticchi. "It's an incredible, unique place," with the dining room literally surrounded by the sea, "everything makes more sense here," he comments.

At the moment, work is underway to be punctual for the appointment on September 17, when Da Lucio – no longer Trattoria – will open its doors in the new location. The most substantial novelty, along with new furnishings and mise en place details, is a service kitchen in the dining room, with monolithic counters complete with a wood-fired oven and visible grill, to eliminate the boundaries between the dining room and kitchen, shorten distances, rationalize energies, "channeling them into concrete things instead of running between the dining room and kitchen. Plus, I'll have all the customers under my eye and it will allow me to provide more tailor-made service than before."

How Trattoria Da Lucio is changing

"The restaurant of dreams," as Ticchi defines it, is the push towards a new, further change in the approach to the cuisine branded Da Lucio, which has always made perspective the focal point of work: a new way of looking at fish, at the relationship between the animal and vegetable worlds, at the role of time in the kitchen. Now is the time for an evolution of intentions, "a more sustainable choice over time," says the laconic Ticchi. With the new research and development department, he has long been working on the reopening menu, which will redefine some of the restaurant's cornerstones, starting from the role of animal protein, "There will be vegetables, farm animals, and the sea as the first choice, a starting and destination point, passing through hills and woods. We are expanding our vision without betraying it, rethinking the menu to have a more sustainable outlook." Maturation remains at the center of the work - whether for a fruit, a vegetable, or something else - giving more value to time, while the fifth quarter remains, the zero-waste kitchen, the philosophy from head to tail. While working on a well-structured non-alcoholic pairing. Not only that: with the new venue, there will also be a garden of halophytic herbs that grows directly on the cliff, "the only greenery we can afford to have in that context, watered by the sea," explains Ticchi. Lorenzo Barbasetti takes care of it, who with The Tidal Garden is giving new life to the salted lands in the Venetian lagoon.

Da Lucio: the story of an unexpected restaurant

The debut was in 2019, after a warm-up at Necessaire in Rimini where Jacopo Ticchi and Enrico Gori cut their teeth, then the move to the first Trattoria Da Lucio, with about thirty covers, and a kitchen that interpreted the taste of the sea with an intention and attention that were hard to come by. It was they who, in fact, were the first to clearly and directly interpret Josh Niland's teaching on fish aging. Not surprisingly, they both worked in Australia. It didn't take long for that teaching to evolve, giving rise to an original cuisine, and for Trattoria Da Lucio to move to a second venue, at the foot of a hotel on the Rimini seafront.