Best Restaurants in Province of Novara: Fine Dining, Local Gems & Where to Eat

Here is the mild confession: most people pass through the Province of Novara without stopping to eat. They are on their way to Milan, or to the lakes, or to the Alps, and Novara registers as something glimpsed from a train window – a cathedral dome, a flat horizon, rice fields stretching away into the light. Which is, frankly, their loss. Because the province that produces some of Italy’s finest risotto rice, sits at the foot of the Ossola valleys, and shares a border with the wine hills of the Alto Piemonte has developed a dining culture that is quieter than its neighbours’, more rooted, and considerably less interested in impressing anyone. It is the kind of food that makes you put your fork down and think for a moment. Then pick it up again immediately.

The Fine Dining Scene: Michelin Stars and Serious Kitchens

The Province of Novara does not shout about its high-end restaurants, which is either admirable restraint or a catastrophic marketing failure, depending on your perspective. What it does have is a collection of serious kitchens where chefs are working with the extraordinary local larder – Carnaroli rice, lake fish, mountain herbs, aged cheeses, truffles from the foothills – and treating it with the kind of respect that earns column inches in the right publications.

The Alto Piemonte region, which sweeps into the northern reaches of the province, has long attracted chefs interested in alpine and lacustrine ingredients. Restaurants here tend to be quieter, more considered affairs than the celebrity dining rooms of Milan or Turin – tasting menus that feel like a conversation about place rather than a performance. The wine pairings, when they come, lean heavily on the local nebbiolo-based wines of Ghemme and Boca, which are among Italy’s most underestimated bottles. If a restaurant in this region offers a pairing menu built around Alto Piemonte DOC wines, take it without hesitation and consider yourself ahead of the curve by approximately fifteen years.

Several restaurants in and around Novara city and the lake district of Orta San Giulio have achieved or consistently flirted with Michelin recognition – places where the cooking is technically precise but never cold, where a risotto might arrive looking deceptively simple and turn out to be the best thing you eat in Italy that year. For verified current Michelin starred establishments, the Michelin Guide Italy is updated annually and worth consulting before any serious trip to the region.

Local Trattorias and the Art of Eating Without Ceremony

The real dining soul of the Province of Novara lives not in the fine dining rooms but in the trattorias, the family-run tavernas, the places where the menu is handwritten on a chalkboard and changes daily because the owner’s wife bought what looked good at the market that morning. These are the restaurants that travellers who know the region speak about in slightly hushed tones, because they know how easily they can be ruined by attention.

In the countryside around Borgomanero and through the villages of the Novara lowlands, you will find restaurants that have been feeding the same families for three or four generations. The rooms are usually unremarkable. The wine list often runs to two pages at most, with bottles from local producers who do not export. The bread arrives before you have taken your coat off. What they do – the slow-braised meats, the hand-rolled pasta, the risotti cooked to a wave-like consistency the Italians call all’onda – they do with the absolute confidence of people who have never considered doing it any other way.

Look for places that list paniscia on the menu. This is Novara’s defining dish: a thick, deeply flavoured risotto made with Saluggia or Vialone Nano rice, borlotti beans, red wine, lard, and a soffritto of vegetables and salami. It is not elegant. It is the kind of dish that was designed to get agricultural workers through a cold October day, and it succeeds on every level. Order it. Do not attempt to eat it outdoors in summer, unless you are feeling unusually determined.

Lake Orta: Dining on the Water

Orta San Giulio is one of those places that has somehow resisted the full machinery of mass tourism – smaller and quieter than its famous neighbours Como and Maggiore, with a village centre that you can walk across in ten minutes and a lake that glitters without trying. The dining scene here reflects this quality: intimate, unhurried, focused on lake fish and local produce.

Restaurants around the lake serve lavaret (a local whitefish), perch fillets cooked with butter and sage, and lake trout prepared in ways that range from the classical to the quietly inventive. Terraces above the water are the setting for long lunches that begin at one o’clock and are still happening, with some surprise grappa involvement, at four. The village itself has a handful of restaurants that have developed serious reputations – places where booking ahead is essential in high season not because they are fashionable but because they are small, genuinely good, and the locals eat there too.

The lakeside setting also lends itself to a more casual afternoon of aperitivo culture. Several bars and cafés on the Orta waterfront serve excellent Campari-based drinks alongside plates of local cured meats and cheese as the light drops over the island of San Giulio. This is not a beach club situation – Lake Orta is not that kind of lake – but it is its own, rather more civilised version of the same idea.

Hidden Gems: The Ossola Valleys and the Mountain Table

Drive north from Novara city into the Ossola valleys and the landscape changes decisively: the flat rice plains give way to forested valleys and mountain villages where the cooking draws on a completely different tradition – one influenced by the Alps, by proximity to Switzerland, and by centuries of making excellent food from limited ingredients. This is the kind of table that rewards curiosity.

In the Valle Ossola and its branches – the Antigorio, the Vigezzo, the Cannobina – small restaurants and agriturismo serve dishes that rarely appear anywhere else: soups thick with mountain herbs and rye bread, polenta made from local stone-ground flour and served with aged local cheeses, game from the surrounding forests. The Vigezzo valley, sometimes called the Valley of Painters for its artistic history, has a particularly warm restaurant culture – places run by families who supplement their kitchen produce with what they grow or raise themselves.

These are not destinations for the traveller who wants to be seen. They are destinations for the traveller who wants to eat very well in a room where nobody cares what you do for a living, which is, depending on your day, either refreshing or essential.

Food Markets and Producers Worth Knowing

The markets of the Province of Novara are a reliable way to understand what this landscape produces and how seriously people take it. Novara city’s weekly market is a genuine working affair – not a curated artisan experience but a place where local producers sell directly to local households, which means prices are honest and the produce is exceptional.

The rice is the obvious starting point. The lowland plains of Novara are part of Italy’s principal rice-growing region, and varieties like Carnaroli – the one serious risotto cooks reach for first – are grown here with the kind of agricultural seriousness that borders on devotion. Rice producers sometimes sell directly, and buying a kilogram of properly aged Carnaroli to take home is one of the most satisfying edible souvenirs you can acquire in Italy. It fits in a suitcase. It does not leak.

Beyond rice, look for local salumi, particularly the salami di Varzi produced in the border area with the Oltrepo Pavese, aged cheeses from the mountain dairies of the Ossola, and late-season truffles from the foothills around Borgomanero and the Novara hills. The area does not have the truffle fame of Alba – which is nearby enough to create an unfair comparison – but the product is excellent and the prices considerably more reasonable.

What to Order: The Dishes That Define the Province

Every destination has its canonical dishes, and the Province of Novara is no exception. Paniscia di Novara is the headliner – the rice, bean and salami dish described earlier – but the supporting cast is equally strong. Risotto in general deserves to be ordered at every opportunity in this part of Italy: the quality of the base ingredient is such that even a simply prepared risotto al burro e parmigiano, here, is a different experience from the same dish made anywhere else.

Tapulone is another local speciality that deserves attention: a finely minced donkey meat dish, stewed slowly with red wine and herbs, that sounds alarming and tastes remarkable. It is found in the Borgomanero area and is one of those hyper-local dishes that exists precisely because a place had an agricultural need and an excellent practical solution. Order it with curiosity and an open mind.

Lake fish from Orta – perch, lavaret, trout – appear throughout the area’s menus in season. Gnocchi and hand-rolled pasta appear in the trattorias. In the mountain restaurants, look for polenta dishes and anything involving local cheese, particularly Bettelmatt – an alpine cheese produced in very small quantities in the high Ossola pastures, made only in summer, and worth considerable effort to track down.

Wine and Local Drinks: Alto Piemonte’s Undersung Bottles

The wines of the Alto Piemonte are among Italy’s most interesting and, it should be said, most under-appreciated. Grown on granite-based soils in the foothills of the Alps, the nebbiolo here produces wines that are different in character from the celebrated Barolos and Barbarescos to the south – lighter in colour, higher in acidity, capable of extraordinary complexity and longevity. The appellations of Ghemme, Boca, Gattinara, and Sizzano all fall within or adjacent to the province, and any serious trip to the region should involve at least one evening dedicated to exploring them properly.

Ghemme DOCG in particular is worth knowing. It produces wines from nebbiolo (here called Spanna) that can age for decades and that pair beautifully with the substantial, slow-cooked dishes of the local table. Bottles from small producers in the zone are still, by the standards of top Italian wine, reasonably priced. This situation will not last indefinitely. Wine writers have noticed.

For aperitivo, look for local vermouth-style drinks and the occasional Piedmontese craft producer working with alpine botanicals. Grappa from the region is taken seriously and served without irony. Coffee, throughout Piedmont, is an art form – short, strong, and served at the bar with a precision that makes the rest of Europe’s café culture feel approximate.

Reservation Tips and the Practicalities of Eating Well Here

A few practical notes for the traveller who wants to eat well in the Province of Novara without unnecessary frustration. First: book ahead, even for places that look casual. The best small restaurants in this region have limited covers, loyal local clientele, and no particular need to accommodate walk-ins. A phone call or email a day or two in advance is not excessive – it is simply courteous, and it signals to the kitchen that someone arriving expects to eat properly.

Second: lunch is taken seriously here. The Italian midday meal remains an occasion, particularly in the countryside and the smaller towns, and the set lunch menus at trattorias often represent both the best value and the freshest cooking of the day. If your diary allows a long lunch, allow one.

Third: Italian restaurant hours apply with some force. Do not arrive at a rural trattoria at 2:45pm and expect a full menu. Do not arrive for dinner before 7:30pm and expect anyone to be there. These are not inconveniences – they are invitations to organise your day correctly, which the local population has been doing perfectly well for centuries.

Finally: if you are staying in a luxury villa in Province of Novara, the option of a private chef is one of the most intelligent ways to engage with the local food culture. A skilled local chef can source from the markets and producers described above, cook paniscia or risotto in your kitchen with Carnaroli bought that morning, and pair the meal with bottles from Ghemme or Boca opened on a terrace as the evening cools. It is, in the most literal sense, the best of both worlds – the province’s finest produce, without leaving the property. Which, after a long and delicious day of eating out, can be exactly right.

For further information on planning your visit to the area, including practical travel advice, cultural highlights, and how to make the most of the landscape, see our full Province of Novara Travel Guide.