Where to Lunch by Boat on Lake Como

The photograph that sells this lake shows a wooden boat tied to a stone quay beneath a parasol, and it is a true photograph. What it leaves out is that the boat left its mooring an hour and a half before the picture was taken and will not be back on it until the light has gone off the water. Distance on Lake Como is deceptive because there is nothing to measure it against: a village on the opposite shore looks like ten minutes and a village four bays north looks like twenty, and neither is right. The lake is long, narrow and walled, and a displacement boat pottering at a civilised speed covers less ground per hour than the map suggests.

The consequence is that lunch by boat has to be planned backwards from the table. If you are eating at one, you are leaving at eleven, earlier if there is anywhere you want to stop, and there always is, because the swim before lunch is half the reason for going. Add fuel, add the person who has to walk down to the mooring with the bags, add the twenty minutes at the end where nobody can find their sandals, and the afternoon has gone. Which is the correct outcome. The mistake is treating it as an errand.

The other thing the photograph leaves out is that the boat has to go home. The return leg is the leg that catches people, because it is into a wind that has been building all afternoon, into low sun for anyone heading south down the Como branch, and undertaken by a crew that has had a bottle of something at lunch. Any skipper here will tell you the same thing: the outward passage is the pleasure and the homeward passage is the job, and you plan for the second one.

None of this is an argument against it. It is the thing most worth doing on this lake with a boat and a free day. But treat it as a small expedition with a lunch in the middle rather than as a restaurant you happen to reach differently, and the whole thing works.

Lake Como runs roughly north to south through a trench in the mountains, and air moves along that trench on a daily cycle that is old enough to have names. The night and early morning wind comes down from the north, off the high ground at the top of the lake; locally it is the tivano, and it is the reason the water at seven in the morning is glass and the reason anyone who owns a wooden boat gets up early. By mid-morning it has died. Then, as the land warms, the flow reverses and a southerly makes up from the direction of Como. This is the breva, and it builds through the afternoon.

This is not weather. It is the ordinary behaviour of the lake on a settled summer day, and it decides everything about a lunch. A landing stage on a south-facing shore that was flat calm at eleven has half a metre of chop slapping into it by two, and a boat lying alongside it is grinding its fenders against stone while you are trying to order coffee. A north-facing bay is the reverse. Local skippers do not check the forecast so much as check the hour.

So the operative question when choosing where to eat is not which restaurant but which aspect. In the middle of the day in summer you want to be tucked behind something: a headland, an island, the inside of a bay that opens northwards. You also want to have arrived before the breeze has properly filled in. This is the real reason experienced people take the first sitting, and it has nothing to do with getting a table.

The exception is the weather that is actually weather. Thunderstorms build over the mountains through the afternoon in July and August and arrive fast, with a violent line squall in front of them that can put up a short, steep sea in minutes. If the tops have gone dark behind the western ridge while you are on the pudding, you leave. Everybody who works on this water has been caught once and does not intend to be caught twice.

The shoreline of this lake is not a beach with restaurants along it. It is, for most of its length, a wall. The ground falls steeply into the water and keeps falling; you can be a boat's length off the stones and have more water beneath you than you have any use for. That geology is why the villas here have boathouses cut into their foundations and why the villages have quays rather than slipways, and it is why a restaurant sitting three metres from the lake very often has no way of taking a boat at all.

Where a landing stage does exist it is a specific, finite, privately held thing, and it is worth knowing what you are asking for when you ask about it. It will take two boats, occasionally three. It will have a maximum length that is not a preference but a fact about the structure. It may dry out at the inside end when the lake is low in late winter, and it may be awash at the outside end in a wet June. It will have mooring rings or bollards of a particular size, which is why any boat that uses these places carries more warp than seems necessary. And it belongs to the restaurant, which means the answer to whether you can use it is a favour rather than a right.

The correct time to ask is when you book the table, in the same sentence, and the useful thing to give is the length of the boat rather than its name. Nobody on the receiving end cares what it is; they care whether it fits alongside the one that is already coming. In August the jetty slots go before the covers do, and a restaurant with three tables left at one o'clock may have had no space on the water since March.

Then there is the arrival itself, which is where visitors betray themselves. Come in slowly and against the wind if you possibly can; have the fenders down and the lines made up before you are within fifty metres, not after; and put somebody on the bow who is willing to step, not jump. If nobody comes down to take a line, that is normal: most of these places are running a kitchen, not a marina. And leave the boat so that it can be got out again without moving three others, because at some point in the afternoon somebody will need to.

The people who have kept boats here longest almost never eat at the place they tie up to. They uncouple the two problems. The boat goes to a public landing stage, a village basin where private craft are permitted, or a berth belonging to somebody they know, and then everybody walks for ten minutes. It is not a compromise; it is the better version of the day.

What it buys is choice. Instead of the one restaurant in the village with a pontile, you have all of them, including the one up the lane behind the church that has no view and much better cooking. It also removes the low hum of anxiety that runs under a lunch spent watching your own boat work against a wall in a building breeze, which is a real cost even if nobody itemises it.

It buys flexibility at the other end too. A public quay is lit, it is usually watched by somebody, and it does not care what time you come back to it. A private jetty at a restaurant does: they would like the space for the evening service, and staying alongside past four while everybody has a coffee and a swim is a slightly larger imposition than it feels like.

The one thing this arrangement asks of you is that you know where the public spaces actually are, because they are not signposted for visitors and the rules differ from village to village. Some basins are for residents, some are for the ferry alone, some take private boats on a first-come basis and some have somebody who will appear and want a word. That local map is genuinely useful knowledge and it is most of what a skipper is being paid for.

Where you start decides where you should eat, and the lake divides into a few honest options. From the central basin, everything is available: the two southern branches open in front of you, the crossing to the opposite shore takes minutes rather than a session, and a boat kept anywhere near Punta Spartivento has the widest menu on the lake. This is the real luxury of the centre and it is priced into every house that has a mooring there.

From the lower Como branch, the sensible run is northwards along the western shore, where the villages sit in a line and the water is deep to within a few metres of the wall. The stretch around Isola Comacina and the bay behind it is the natural lunch destination on that reach. It is sheltered, it has been feeding people arriving by water for an extraordinarily long time, and the island itself has almost nothing on it, which is the point. It also gets busy in a very concentrated way in August, so go early or go in June.

North of the centre the lake widens and the character changes: bigger water, more wind, longer distances, fewer places to hide when the afternoon fills in. It is a magnificent run and it is not a casual lunch. If you are going up there, take a skipper who knows where the gusts come off the side valleys, and accept that you are committing the day rather than the middle of it.

And there is the version that involves no restaurant at all, which we would defend as the finest of them: a cool box, a bottle in a wet towel, bread and cheese and peaches bought that morning, and an anchorage under a wooded slope where nobody can reach you on foot. It requires knowing three or four bays with holding ground and shade, which is knowledge that takes a season to accumulate and about four minutes to hand over.

By four the water has texture on it and the light has moved. If you are heading south down the Como branch you are going into the sun and into the breeze at once, and a boat that was dry all morning starts putting spray over the windscreen. It is not dangerous and it is not comfortable, and if there is anybody on board in a good dress it is worth thinking about ten minutes before you leave rather than ten minutes after.

The commercial traffic matters on the way back too. The car ferries work the central crossing between Bellagio, Varenna, Menaggio and Cadenabbia on a fixed pattern all day, and the fast services run the length of the lake. They are large, they are on a timetable, they do not manoeuvre for pleasure craft, and the sensible assumption is that you have not been seen. Cross behind them, never across the bow, and give the landing stages a wide berth when one is approaching, because a ferry putting its stern in to a quay pushes a great deal of water sideways.

Coming home after dark is a different job again. The shoreline lights make the unlit things effectively invisible: a mooring buoy, a swimmer's marker, an unlit tender on a swinging mooring. The mountains kill any residual glow off the sky much earlier than the hour suggests. A private jetty with no light on it, approached in a cross-breeze, is a manoeuvre that wants doing at walking pace with somebody forward holding a torch. Anyone who has done it will already have thought about this. If you are driving yourself, decide before dinner whether you are happy to, because the honest answer at eleven at night is usually no.

Which brings us to the only piece of advice in this article that costs money. On a day when you intend to eat and drink properly on the far side of the lake, take somebody to drive the boat. It is not extravagance; it is what turns an operation back into a lunch.