Restaurant Nives — Restaurant in Salten-Schlern - Salto-Sciliar

Looks great online—absolute disaster in reality. Worst meal of my entire six-week Europe trip. Here’s why:

Atmosphere: Nice decor, good acoustics—expectations were high.

Food (or lack thereof): French onion soup – A joke. No caramelized onions, just a bowl of cheese masking bland broth. Sent it back. Not worth the calories. Beef carpaccio – Looks gourmet, tastes like nothing. Low-quality meat, dull aioli, flavorless pickled onions. The tomahawk steak (1.1kg, €150) – A crime against beef. Ordered medium-rare, got blue. They told us to cook it ourselves on a cooling pan—impossible. No resting time, and worst of all, they sliced it with the grain instead of against it, making it unbearably tough. Properly sliced meat should be cut against the grain to shorten the muscle fibers and keep it tender. Instead, we got rubbery, impossible-to-chew strips. Unless you have an alligator’s bite force, you literally couldn’t eat it. Service: Pointed out the problem, got dismissed. No apology, no accountability. When we refused to pay for the steak, they argued instead of fixing it. Rude and unprofessional.

Final Verdict: Selva has fantastic restaurants serving high-quality beef at great prices—this isn’t one of them. I wouldn’t eat here if they paid me. Avoid at all costs. Response to the manager: I tried both the soup and the meat, and it’s stated in the review. I want to mention that you did try to charge me for 150 euro steak, and when I refused you got angry. I suggest instead of bashing me personally, cook the onions for more than 10 minutes, serve your steaks it in the right temperature and learn how to slice it. That’s pretty basic. I’m sure that other people reading this review, who can literally see the photos that show exactly what I wrote, will be smart enough to avoid your...

I visited Nives after seeing its listing on the Michelin guide and being seduced by its beautifully curated website and impeccably photographed dishes. Unfortunately, what followed was a culinary disaster from start to finish. The only positive aspect was the impeccable service.

To begin with, I ordered a vegetable cannolo, which inexplicably left a strong aftertaste of bleach; yes, bleach! The salad was average, featuring very blancs iceberg salad, strawberries, a few chunks of parmesan, and a drizzle of olive oil: acceptable but utterly unremarkable. The carpaccio? Poorly sliced, coarse, and drowned in a heavy-handed sauce clearly designed to mask the mediocrity of the meat itself.

Things only got worse. My partner’s tagliatelle came inexplicably topped with a red berry coulis, a pairing so absurd we were left speechless. Meanwhile, my ragu pasta was the embodiment of blandness: fatty, overcooked meat, lacking any depth or balance. A complete letdown for anyone who appreciates a well-made ragu.

Side dishes were equally disappointing: grilled vegetables were lifeless, potatoes oily and unpleasant, and the final insult: the spinach, boiled to oblivion and swimming in water, served in a bowl as if it were soup. Nothing was seared, seasoned, or remotely enjoyable.

We left without dessert and frankly, without a shred of doubt: this was one of the worst dining experiences I’ve had in recent memory.

That such a place is featured in the Michelin guide is deeply concerning. If this is the standard being promoted, one has to seriously question the criteria used for inclusion. Nives is a trap: photogenic but disastrous in the kitchen. Foodies with any sense of taste should...

This is a difficult review to write because this restaurant has good food, really nice ambiance and so many little wonderful surprises – like an amuse bouche bite over a bowl of sunflower seeds, like beautiful, warm breads with homemade herb butter and nut butter, like a little plate of tiny dessert bites even though you didn’t order dessert. They also have fantastic wine, and the plate my son and I shared of creamy polenta with cheese and sausage was hearty, but lovely. Where this restaurant completely fell short was in the service department. The food came quickly, but of the three or so servers who visited our table during dinner each one had a terrible attitude. They seemed annoyed, put out, unfriendly, they rushed our order & when my cousin asked to hold onto her sunflower seed bowl to add them to her salad they were totally put off. Service, to me, goes far beyond getting a dish out in a timely manner, it’s also being polite, friendly and making the guest feel welcome. We felt none of those things. There was even a situation where the server gave me too much change when we paid (about €27 too much). I pointed this out to him and he argued with me! Here I am trying to be honest and make sure this guy/the restaurant had the proper amount of money and again, I was treated rudely. I would not eat here again mostly based on the awful service, but the food is also good, but not outstanding, and yet...