Vincenzo Dascanio Cafe - Portofino

Gelato, Riviera plates and a harbour terrace

Artisanal gelato is the clearest signature here, and it sits inside a menu that runs from breakfast through dinner rather than stopping at the pastry case. Vincenzo Dascanio Cafe opened in Portofino in 2024 as the Ligurian branch of the Vincenzo Dascanio Café group, which already had rooms in Cernobbio on Lake Como, St. Moritz, Milan and Como, plus smaller boutique outlets in the same two cities. Cooking follows the Riviera di Levante: regional ingredients and coastal dishes folded into a café-dining format, with a curated cocktail list alongside. Breakfast is the pastry moment, with viennoiserie and morning pastries built into the same menu rather than kept on a separate counter, so the venue reads as a full-service bistrot with a pastry habit rather than a morning stop that grew a kitchen.

A design-led room above the harbour

The venue overlooks the harbour in one of the Riviera di Levante's best known villages, where luxury travel, coastal cooking and a compact village centre meet within a few streets. Its founder built the group around scenic, high-end destinations, and in Portofino that strategy becomes a harbour-facing bistrot aimed equally at international visitors and residents moving through the centre. The opening was framed as the brand's move into Liguria and was celebratory in tone, which suits how the room behaves now: pastries and coffee in the morning, regional plates through the middle of the day, gelato as a dessert-led draw, cocktails in the evening. The identity is less a counter piled with breads than a seated café where design, setting and Ligurian flavours are meant to carry equal weight.

What to order across the day

Begin with the artisanal gelato. It is the most clearly named signature of the Portofino venue and the closest thing to a house calling card, and it fits the group's wider reputation for dessert-led craft. In the morning the reason to sit is viennoiserie and breakfast pastry with coffee. Later it is the Riviera di Levante cooking, which stretches a visit well past a quick sweet stop and gives the room its lunch and dinner shape. Cocktails make it useful after the lunch rush and again once the harbour lights come on. The group's pastry credentials give that craft some weight: its founder also took on Milan's Pasticceria Gattullo, a house dating to 1961, keeping a piece of Italian pastry heritage inside the same company.