Acqua Pazza — Restaurant in Ponza

My wife and I visited Ponza and were staying in hotel Grand Hotel Santa Domitilla. There are many restaurants between our hotel and your restaurant. The 28th of July evening we decided to eat dinner in your restaurant. It was about 7.30 pm. The whole restaurant was almost empty; only two persons were sitting there. When we were taking seat with the table for two, one of your staff said welcome to us. We asked another of your staff / Mr Marco / for Menu. In that time we were already seated. He said that we have to leave, as the whole restaurant is fully booked for the whole evening. We did not understand why we were seated and welcomed in the beginning but after we were not allowed to eat. There was no sign about reservation for the tables. There were no sign about anything. He was not polite. On the contrary he was rather aggressive in that time. I was trying to come to some solution and asked him about reservation for the next day, or day after. His answer was that there is no table for us for the next two weeks. The whole situation was humiliating for us. We travel rather often. We visited many different countries. But we were never treated so badly as in your restaurant. It was big surprise that Italian people can be so unprofessional and...

My partner and I had dinner at Acqua Pazza, as we wanted to have a fine dining experience in Ponza, to celebrate the ending of our vacation in summer 2023. We went for the tasting menu whose dishes you can find in the pictures I am attaching to the review. We found the food well-cooked, simple, and yet tasty: personally, the dishes which really stood-out were the little ravioli with liquid tomato sauce and the chocolate dessert with several consistencies. The wine pairing was perfect as we savoured a white wine locally produced. There were - however - two negative sides to notice. Understanding we are taking about fine dining and high-end restaurants, we personally prefer a more informal atmosphere: we noticed that the restaurant manager was overly present and supervising all the operations, which made the experience a little bit too tight - maybe this can open a room for discussion and supervise the staff from a more distant situation. Secondly, a young couple started to smoke electronic cigarette in the table close to ours (thankfully, they left soon), with no action taken. Overall, I would recommend trying this restaurant as the location on the cliff is A+MAZING, the food and the wine pairing are worth it, and we had a great and...

The highlight of our stay in Ponza. Was there with my wife for our honeymoon. There are two Michelin restaurants on the island and this is one of them. Finally, I got to know what that category means.

We ended up booking it through a recommendation of a local owner of a shop. Otherwise, we would have not bean able to reserve. It worked out well as they gave us a table in the highest room of the structure. View was stunning. Food was extremely delicious. Sea food lovers would be in paradise… but there are also options for people who eat other types of food. Price was over 100 euro per person but we both had a four course meal and a bottle of wine. Plus they also gave us an extra appetizer which we did not order but that’s part of their approach to all their guests I assume.

Service was immaculate - kind, friendly and smiling staff.

Recommended 100% by us. Hope you will be lucky enough to squeeze and book.

PS: we took a bunch of photos of the meals but with another phone so...