Food & drink
Eight Michelin stars in one mountain province. Canederli, speck, and the finest sparkling wine in Italy at the estate that makes it. The most interesting food culture in northern Italy.
Trentino’s food culture is a direct product of its geography and its history. The Brenner Pass has been the main Alpine crossing between northern and southern Europe for two thousand years, and the cooking reflects every direction from which people arrived. From the north: canederli (bread dumplings), speck (air-dried ham), apple strudel, and a love of dairy that produces some of Italy’s finest cheeses. From the south: handmade pasta, risotto cooked with local wine, polenta from the valley maize. From the mountains themselves: lichen, wild herbs, game, alpine fish, and the fungi that the forests produce in extraordinary abundance from September. The province’s eight Michelin-starred restaurants are not an accident — they are the natural outcome of this particular larder, taken seriously.
Locanda Margon
The restaurant of Ferrari Trento — Italy’s finest sparkling wine estate — set in an elegant country house above the Adige valley with sweeping views over Trento and the surrounding peaks. Chef Edoardo Fumagalli’s three tasting menus are built around local Trentino ingredients reinterpreted with refined technique. The Passione Bollicine menu is designed specifically to pair with Ferrari sparkling wines throughout every course. The adjacent Bistrot offers a more informal version of the same kitchen with outdoor terrace dining. One of the most beautifully situated restaurants in Italy.
locandamargon.it · Via Margone 15, Ravina di Trento · t: +39 0461 349401
El Molin
Since 1990, chef Alessandro Gilmozzi has been working in a restored old mill in Val di Fiemme — building one of the most original bodies of work in Italian gastronomy in a building that almost nobody outside the region knows about. The cooking is a hymn to the Trentino mountains: lichen, unusual alpine herbs, local dairy and game, fungi from the surrounding forests. El Molin also features in the 50 Top Italy 2025 ranking alongside its Michelin star. One of the most compelling restaurants in Italy at any altitude.
ristoranteelmolin.com · Cavalese, Val di Fiemme
Scrigno del Duomo
Outdoor tables looking directly onto Trento’s gleaming Romanesque basilica — one of the finest restaurant settings in northern Italy. The kitchen is serious without being formal: handmade ravioli, asparagus risotto in season, and a sacher torte that National Geographic Traveller specifically recommends. Below the restaurant, an old Roman wine cellar that the waiters will show you if you ask. The combination of the setting, the cooking, and the unexpectedness of the underground space is difficult to beat.
scrignodelduomo.com · Piazza Duomo 29, Trento
Osteria Il Cappello
A stylish osteria in the centre of Trento offering traditional Trentino dishes prepared with contemporary technique and real understanding of the local larder. The canederli are among the best in the city; the wine list is weighted heavily towards Trentino DOC wines and Ferrari sparkling. The kind of restaurant that serious Italian food writers seek out when they visit a region — grounded, specific, without pretension.
osteriacappello.it · Trento
Tàscaro
Trentino sits at the northern edge of what was, for centuries, Venetian territory — and the bacaro tradition (standing at the bar, small glass of wine, small plates of food) persists in Trento’s wine bars in a way that feels genuinely Venetian without being a pastiche. Tàscaro is the best of them: excellent cicchetti, a selection of local wines by the glass that covers the province’s most interesting producers, and the right atmosphere for an early evening hour before dinner. One of the most enjoyable bars in northern Italy.
Ferrari Trento makes the sparkling wine served at Italian state dinners and at the Formula 1 podium — the finest sparkling wine produced in Italy by any serious measure. The estate’s winery tours are excellent and end with a tasting that covers the full range. Beyond Ferrari, the province produces Teroldego Rotaliano — a powerful red grape found nowhere else in the world, grown on the alluvial gravel of the Campo Rotaliano north of Trento — and a range of white wines (Nosiola, Müller-Thurgau, Pinot Grigio) that reflect the altitude and the Alpine influence. The wine estates of the Trentino Wine Road (Strada del Vino e dei Sapori del Trentino) are open to visitors throughout the season.