Where to Eat on Lake Como: How to Eat Well Here

Almost everything you need to know about eating on Lake Como can be derived from one observation: the lake's restaurants are distributed around its landing stages, and the economics of a table change completely with every hundred metres you move away from one. A room in the first lane off the quay is serving people who arrived on the last boat and are leaving on the one after next. It will never see most of them again, and its menu, its prices and its hours are built accordingly.

Walk five minutes and the arithmetic inverts. A place in the upper lanes, or at the far end of a village, or on the road out towards the next hamlet, is largely feeding the same few hundred people all year, plus whichever visitors were determined enough to find it. It has to be good, because it cannot afford to disappoint a customer it will see again in three weeks. This is not a subtlety about Lake Como; it is the whole map.

The signals are easy to read once you look for them. Menus in five languages with photographs of the dishes; a card presented before you have sat down; a room that empties and refills between one boat and the next; identical listings in three neighbouring establishments. These are quay restaurants and they are honest about what they are. Conversely: a short card, some of it handwritten, dishes that will not be on it next month, and a room where at least a few tables are speaking Italian to a proprietor they know.

None of which means the waterfront is to be avoided. Some of the most serious cooking on the lake is on the water, in places that also happen to sit two hundred metres from a landing stage. The rule is not about the view; it is about who the room is built for.

There are two quite different meals available here and visitors almost always take the same one twice. The lakeside meal is the one everybody pictures: a terrace at the water, a fish, a bottle of something white and cold, boats going past. The upland meal is what the region has actually eaten for centuries, and it is a short drive away up a series of hairpins, into villages that have their backs to the lake entirely.

The mountains behind both shores are farming country, and the cooking up there follows from it: polenta, often the dark, coarse kind, and often taragna with buckwheat and cheese beaten through it; braised and roasted meats; game in the autumn; mountain cheeses; cured pork; mushrooms after rain. The valleys running north-east lead into a serious wine region whose reds are made from the same grape as Piedmont's but grown on terraces, and which locals drink far more than anything from the shore.

The upland rooms tend to be simpler, larger, noisier and considerably cheaper, and the service is briskly unsentimental. Many are family concerns with a few rooms above; some are working farms serving what they raise. They keep different hours from the lake: lunch is the main event, dinner can be early, and Monday closing is close to universal. In some of them nobody will speak much English, which is part of the pleasure rather than a problem.

The way we would use them is this: the lake for lunch when you are already on the water, and the hills for dinner when you want to eat properly and are prepared to drive up and back. Anyone spending a fortnight here and never leaving the shoreline has eaten one very narrow version of this region.

The lake's own fish is a small, specific category and it repays understanding. Three things appear again and again. Perch, persico, is filleted, floured and fried in butter with sage, and served alongside or on top of rice; done well it is delicate and faintly sweet, and it is the dish most worth ordering on the shore. Shad, the agone, is salted, dried in the sun and pressed, at which point it becomes missoltino: dark, oily, intensely savoury, grilled and eaten with polenta and a little vinegar. The mildest of the three is whitefish, lavarello or coregone, usually baked or grilled whole.

Beyond those there are tench, which the villages around the lower Lecco branch stuff and bake, pike, char from the deeper water, eel, and tiny bleak fried whole. None of it is elaborate cooking. The tradition here is a preserved-food tradition from a place with long winters and no coastline: dried, salted, cured, and eaten with polenta.

The honest complication is supply. The lake's commercial fishery is small, its stocks are managed with closed seasons, and demand from restaurants in July far exceeds what the boats bring in. A good deal of the perch served on this lake in high summer was farmed or came from elsewhere, and a room that offers every lake species at every time of year is telling you something about how it buys. There is nothing scandalous about this and the fish is often perfectly good; but the places that specify what is theirs and what is not are the ones to trust.

Two smaller points. Missoltini divide people sharply. Try them once, early in a meal, and do not order them for the table on faith. And the local white to drink with all of it is not from the lake at all, which has almost no viticulture worth the name; it comes from the terraces to the north or from the sparkling-wine country an hour east.

The single largest cause of a disappointing evening here is arriving in a village in November and discovering that four of its five restaurants are shut. The lake's hospitality is overwhelmingly seasonal: a great many kitchens close from late autumn until somewhere around Easter, staff go elsewhere, and the villages return to a handful of places that feed the people who actually live there.

The pattern is not uniform. Villages with a real year-round population keep more open than the small waterfront hamlets, which can close almost completely. The larger towns at either end of the lake, and the villages up in the hills, carry on more or less regardless. And the reopening is uneven: some places come back for Easter, some wait for May, and some run a reduced week in the shoulder months, opening Thursday to Sunday only.

Within the season there is a second pattern that catches people out: the hours. Lunch service is often over earlier than visitors expect, and a good many kitchens stop taking orders in the evening earlier than they would in Milan, or in almost any capital city. The reason is practical rather than unfriendly. Staff have to get home, and on this lake getting home can mean a road or a boat. If you want to eat late, you need to know which few places do it, and to say so when you book.

The upshot is that the shoulder seasons, which are otherwise the loveliest time to be here, need more planning than August does. In late October or March, decide where you are eating before you set out, and telephone. Nobody's published hours on this lake should be trusted in the shoulder months.

In high season the lake has a supply problem that money does not solve on the day. The good rooms are small, and twenty to forty covers is normal. They are booked by returning guests, by the villas along the shore and by the hotels on behalf of theirs, and by the time a visitor is looking, the two services that matter are gone. Turning up at eight on a Saturday in August and expecting to be fed somewhere you would want to eat is optimistic.

What works is unglamorous. Book before you arrive, not once you are here. Take the early service rather than the late one, which is easier to get and, on a hot evening with the wind still in the south, often the pleasanter of the two. Eat well at lunch and lightly in the evening, which is what the season is designed for anyway. Be flexible about the day: a Tuesday is a different proposition from a Saturday. And treat the fortnight around the middle of August, when Italy itself is on holiday, as a separate and harder problem.

The other lever is who is asking. A booking made by somebody the restaurant deals with regularly, whether a house manager, a villa's staff or a concierge with a genuine relationship rather than a list, will find tables that a stranger's email will not, because the restaurant knows the guests will turn up, will be on time and will behave. That is not favouritism; it is a small business protecting itself against no-shows in its only profitable eight weeks.

And be reliable in return. Confirm on the day, arrive within a few minutes of the time, telephone if you are delayed, and never book two places for the same evening to decide later. The lake is small, the restaurants talk to each other, and a reputation for cancelling late follows a name around a village for years.

Lunch reached by water is one of the genuine pleasures of this lake and it is less widely available than it looks. Sitting on the water and being reachable from the water are two different things: the shoreline is steep and walled, it goes deep almost immediately, and a great many restaurants with tables at the lake's edge have no jetty at all and cannot take a boat.

Where a place does have a landing stage, the arrangement is private and finite. There is usually room for two or three boats, a maximum length that is not negotiable, and an expectation that you will have arranged it when you booked the table rather than announcing it on arrival. Somebody may or may not come down to take a line. In August those jetty slots go before the tables do.

The alternative, which is what experienced people here mostly do, is to uncouple the boat from the door: tie up at a public landing stage or a village basin where private boats are permitted, and walk the last ten minutes. It opens up every restaurant in the village rather than the two with jetties, and it removes the anxiety of watching your own boat move against a wall in the afternoon breeze while you are trying to eat.

Two pieces of timing. The wind on this lake follows a daily cycle: flat early, with the southerly making up through the middle of the day. A jetty that was comfortable at eleven can therefore be an awkward lee shore by two, and the first lunch service is usually the calmer one. And if you are going home after dark, an unlit private jetty is a different job from the same jetty at six; a skipper will already have thought about it, and if you are driving yourself, you should. The mechanics of moving about on the water are set out in our guide to the lake by boat.

You can tell a great deal from the doorway, and it takes about fifteen seconds. Look at what is written down: a short card, some of it in one language, a few dishes that plainly will not be there in six weeks. Look at the tables: whether anybody is speaking Italian, whether anybody is over sixty, whether anybody clearly comes here often. Look at whether the wine is from the valleys and the country nearby rather than a list assembled from a national catalogue.

The counter-signals are equally clear. Photographs of the food. A pizza oven alongside a fish menu. Four courses of everything, all year. A man outside the door inviting you in, which on this lake, in the lanes around a landing stage, is close to conclusive.

Ask better questions, too. Not what is good, which invites the answer everybody gets, but what is on today that will not be on next month. In a family room, the honest answer to that question is the meal. In a quay restaurant, there will not be an answer.

And accept the trade-off knowingly. There is nothing wrong with a plate of pasta and a glass of white on a terrace over the water in the middle of a hot afternoon, with a boat to catch and a view worth paying for. Just do not confuse it with dinner, and do not judge the region's cooking by it.

We keep a standing list for members: the name, the telephone number, the person to ask for, which service to take, whether a boat can come alongside and how far in advance to book. It covers both shores and the villages above them, and it is revised through the season rather than annually, because on this lake a kitchen can change hands in March and nobody updates anything online until August.

It is not published, for a straightforward reason. The rooms on it seat twenty or thirty people. A published list of small restaurants on Lake Como stops being useful within one season of being published, and the damage is done to the places themselves as much as to the readers. A family kitchen that suddenly turns over four times a night stops being the thing that got it recommended.

What we will say publicly is everything in this guide, because it is structural and it does not wear out: walk away from the quay, go up the hill for dinner, order the perch, book before you travel, telephone in the shoulder months, ask about the jetty when you book the table. Someone applying only those rules will eat considerably better here than someone working from a list of names.

For members, we will also simply book it. That is usually the difference in August: not knowing where, but being someone the restaurant already knows.