By Sello Ramosepele · Founding Editor · 5 min read

The best restaurants are usually born from obsession. In the case of Nonna’s Riviera, that obsession is a grandmother’s kitchen in Calabria, filtered through the sensibility of a Johannesburg-born chef who has spent his adult life trying to recreate what he tasted there as a child.

Chef Marco De Luca returned to South Africa after fifteen years in Italian restaurant kitchens — Milan, Venice, a formative period at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in the Amalfi Coast — with a single intention: to open a restaurant where Italian cooking was taken seriously.

What makes Nonna’s Riviera distinctly South African is in the wine list, which prioritises South African producers making wines in a cool, elegant, Italian idiom, and in the warmth of the service, which feels less like professional hospitality and more like being welcomed home.