Seafood restaurants in Rimini. Fine dining. Trattoria Da Lucio.

Last visit: March 2025

Price range: €€€€€/€€€€€

My rating: 9/10

Website: https://da-lucio.com/

Instagram: @trattoria_da_lucio

There are restaurants that feed you—and then there are restaurants that speak to you. Trattoria Da Lucio, in Rimini, does more than speak: it questions you, provokes you, makes you laugh nervously in front of a fish skin terrine, and forces you to reckon with your very idea of “seafood cuisine.”If you thought the height of marine creativity was sea bass tartare with microgreens, you're in the wrong place. Here, things get serious.

The setting: understated luxury with poise

Forget the checkered tablecloth cliché of trattorias in name only. This is a refined, elegant environment, luxurious without pretension. Calibrated lighting, minimalist details, and a warm human touch balance an aesthetic that borders on a gastronomic boutique. The staff is precise and knowledgeable, but never stiff—on the contrary, they're relaxed, informal, and welcoming.

The tasting menu: a journey into contemporary seafood

Raw course

The experience opens like a symphony. Amberjack, sea bass roe, and tonka bean: richness and freshness dancing with the toasty-sweet note of tonka—a surprising, if not yet fully convincing, pairing. Monkfish with prawns offers a marine-terrestrial ballet, while bluefin tuna paired with cedar, oyster, and caperberries (cucunci) teeters on imbalance; here, the briny punch of the cucunci overpowers the delicacy of the other elements. Samphire and sea lemons bring an acidic caress, like a saline breeze from the Adriatic.

Then comes the fish skin terrine—and the first culinary detonation.

This terrine is a love letter to noble scraps. Properly gelatinous, deeply umami, with a lingering flavor that evokes the golden crust of salt-baked sea bass… sheer genius.

Crust

Skate in a black pepper crust: a bold, sensual, spicy dish. You’d never expect skate to channel such carnivorous intensity, yet here it is—its tender flesh elevated by a crunchy, aromatic crust that teases out its natural sweetness.Next, a combination of pine nuts and a bluefish sauce—a stroke of genius that leaves you wondering, why hasn’t anyone done this before?Less successful is the wild greens with cuttlefish liver: the liver itself is exquisite, briny and silky, but the bitterness of the greens clashes awkwardly rather than complements.

Charcoal

Now we enter a more contemplative territory: dry-aged fish cooked over embers. This isn’t a gimmick—it’s a molecular reinterpretation of the sea. The fillet has the texture of a dry-aged ribeye, but with a deep, iodine-forward flavor that lingers long after each bite.Then comes a "fifth quarter" of the sea, lacquered in the wood oven: livers, stomachs, and internal organs transformed into a mystical experience.A nod too to the tripe of mixed fish, a dish as surprising as it is elegant—rich yet unexpectedly digestible.The onions cooked in charcoal ash provide a kind of vegetal catharsis: smoky, sweet, redemptive.

Off-menu: the fish offal sausage

Here, we ascend to the sublime.Imagine a marine ‘nduja—spicy, savory, enveloping. It arrives with the hush of a blasphemy whispered at the altar.But after one bite, all you want to do is shout hallelujah.

Guazzetto

A “old-school fish stew”, lightened in structure but not in soul: all the fish you’d expect is there, the flavors are clear, the broth is crystal, the scent pure fisherman's home. It looks like a simple dish, but let’s not be fooled—this was, hands down, the best guazzetto of my life. A dish to remember in silence.

Intermezzo

Octopus and coffee: you think, “Ah, here comes the conceptual plate”—and then it works.The octopus embraces the bitter roast like it always secretly wanted to be an espresso. Then, a lime granita: sharp, clean, cleansing. It scrubs away any lingering guilt like a palate confessional.

Pasta

Empty cappelletti with cream and fish liver. A bold declaration of war on every Emilia-Romagna grandmother—and yet, in this case, the grandmothers win.The fish liver brings a sharp, marine bitterness, the cream rounds it out... but the cappelletti remain empty. And empty, despite the conceptual intent, is still a bit of a letdown.

Seafood restaurants in Rimini. Trattoria Da Lucio. Final thoughts

Trattoria Da Lucio is not just dinner—it’s an epiphany. This isn’t simply a celebration of fish, but of its meaning, its philosophy, its reincarnation in culinary form. No dish is banal, no pairing arbitrary. This is avant-garde seafood with deep Adriatic roots: provocative, but never pointless.

Not every dish convinces—and that’s part of the charm. You can't innovate without missteps. But looking back at the photos, months later, the flavors come flooding back.And when a restaurant creates new, vivid, unforgettable flavors, well... I’d say it has done its job brilliantly.