- Written by: Mona Biedrzycka
Arrival and Absence
We were late. Terribly late. Over an hour behind schedule, despite leaving Piemonte with what we thought was a generous margin. “It won’t be less than seven hours,” said Michelangelo Mammoliti, the chef of La Rei Natura, and we smiled politely, certain it wouldn’t take more than an hour longer than what Google Maps told us.
We were wrong. The autostrada crawled. The Adriatic horizon maddeningly slow to appear. And by the time we reached Senigallia, our guilt was higher than the early afternoon sun, that specific kind of guilt only people in the industry know - the guilt of disrupting the rhythm. We braced for disapproval.
But when we walked in, flushed and apologetic, Mauro and Catia were waiting - arms open, no judgment, no clock. Just warmth. The only punishment: missing a couple of dishes … and a wry comment from the sommelier about limiting our wine. Even that felt like part of the lesson. At Uliassi, nothing is rushed. But nothing waits either.
Light and Line
From the outside, Uliassi is almost aggressively unassuming: a squat white building set on the promenade, its name written in a gentle cursive above a tiled mural of sailboats. Cyclists pass, dogs trot by, and children in swimsuits trail behind their parents, loudly wailing for gelato. If you didn’t know better, you’d mistake it for a shuttered beach canteen, until you look closer. The lines are too clean. The windows too orderly. There’s something precise beneath the breeziness.
Inside, it’s as composed as a gallery. Natural light floods the space as if it were designed for painting. Sculptural glass objects perch on window ledges, and curated contemporary artworks - subtle, precise, and slightly surreal. It feels more like a collector’s private home than a 3-star Michelin dining room.
There’s no centrepiece. No chandelier. Just silence and slow movement. The waves outside tick with the pace of service. Nothing interrupts. Not the staff, not the view, not the food, which arrives with the confidence of something that knows you’ll understand it later. And in the middle of that, not at the head of a brigade but in constant orbit, is Mauro. Watching, listening, adjusting the invisible things.
I’ve eaten here enough times to know what to expect, or so I thought. But this last visit, it wasn’t the smoked pasta or the sea view that left the mark. It was Mauro: at the height of his acclaim, still editing dishes like drafts, still drifting through the dining room like a man listening for missed notes. Still experimenting.
A Family Vision
He opened Uliassi with his sister, Catia, in 1990 in their hometown of Senigallia, a quiet Adriatic beach town better known for its sand than sophistication. Back then, it was a simple idea: serve food with roots in the sea and traditions of the land. Today, it’s one of 14 restaurants in Italy with three Michelin stars (see the full list below), and it regularly ranks among the World's 50 Best Restaurants (No. 43 in 2025).
Their shared history is visible in everything. Mauro is the structure, the craft, the laboratory. Catia is the atmosphere, the soul, the softness between the edges. She trained in service, but discovered her deeper voice in painting. Her works now quietly inhabit the restaurant like internal organs, not only decorative, but vital. It’s Catia who makes you feel the room before you’ve tasted anything. Her husband, Mauro Paolini, serving as Executive Chef, has been with them nearly since the beginning. He's moving through the kitchen with the intuition of someone who has lived inside the rhythm of this place for over three decades. Together, the three form the restaurant’s core - a family not by style, but by structure.
The Lab as Philosophy
What makes Mauro different is that he doesn’t repeat himself. He invents. Every year, he produces ten new dishes through what he calls the Lab, a test kitchen, a concept studio, a philosophical sketchpad. Some dishes make the menu. Some don’t. But all of them start as questions.
And this year, the question seems to be: What can bitterness do, if it’s not there to punish you? The menu doesn’t shout it, but the dishes do.
There’s a walnut and hop milkshake beside herring with anchovy. Lettuce foam with moss extract with snails, pigeon hearts and begonia leaf. Cold oysters in a razor clam reduction with peach blossom and celery. A sort of palate cleanser of cold red fruit and sweet onion - surprisingly playful, unusually calm and crisp, like someone telling you a truth you weren’t expecting.
There’s a starkness to these LAB plates. A precision in the void. LAB 2025 draws its cues from Mario Giacomelli - Senigallia’s most striking and poetic eye. His photographs: grainy, high contrast, full of silence. The line between black and white. You see it in the plates, too - the space, the reduction, the calm.
There was Calamarata, a thick, tubular pasta from the local Pasta Massi factory, slick with sea urchin, tangerine, juniper, and shiso oil, a kind of Adriatic psychedelia. It tasted like summer at sea: citrus nets on a fishing boat, brine in the air, sun cutting through your eyelashes. Sole arrived in milk cream, quiet and technical. Lamb came roasted, with pecorino oil, black cardamom, and eucalyptus, the kind of plate that haunts you for days.
And then came the Marinara Ossobuco - bone marrow cooked in clam soup, layered with cod tripe and celery seeds. A dish that reads like a riddle, eats like a thesis. Mauro isn’t chasing novelty for shock value; he’s dialling into emotion, into how things feel in the mouth and in the body, even when the mind hasn’t caught up. Sticky with collagen, softly resistant, umami-heavy, and edged with a hint of acidity - Not ‘good’ in the usual sense. Just true.
It concluded with an apricot sorbet infused with cinnamon and saffron and a Senigallia-Brest filled with Chantilly vanilla, frozen cherries, and dried olives. A dessert that refused to behave like one. Sweet, yes - but also restrained, measured.
Pastry chef Mattia Casabianca has been quietly refining these finales for years, desserts that close the menu like a well-placed comma. Not a stop, but a breath. As food writer Giulia Gavagnin noted, his work “signals the full maturation of a pastry chef” - refined, confident, and emotionally legible.
Even the bread was its own prelude. A sourdough with seaweed. A yellow regional loaf made with pecorino. Ancient wheat crisped into white bread. Crackers studded with seeds. They just arrived at the table with no drama around, and yet I’ve had tasting menus with less clarity than that bread basket.
And all of it, the bitterness, the silence, the clarity, is designed with one intention: that you leave feeling something. Mauro once said that when they create a dish, they imagine the reaction it will evoke. A closed eye. A moment of stillness. A small, involuntary moan. That’s the goal. Not to impress, but to reach you. To say you’re here now, let us take care of making it worth it.
It would be enough, in a lesser restaurant, for the food to carry the story. But here, the story is also the room. The feeling of being seen but not surveyed. The sense that timing is not mechanical but human - someone, somewhere, is watching the light change and adjusting the rhythm.
We’d been so focused on the pace, trying to recover lost time, eating with that chef’s tempo we thought might close the gap, that we barely noticed the room.
Then came a sudden laugh, sharp and high and joyful. It broke through the hush. And just like that, we remembered: the restaurant was still full. No one rushing. No one behind. Just people, eating. Present.
The Quiet Master
I was joined this time by Chef Eric Vildgaard of Jordnær, a Danish restaurant that also holds three Michelin stars. He’s no stranger to ambitious cooking. But after our meal, Eric looked out toward the shore and said simply, “That was serious.” Not solemn. Not flashy. Serious, in that way, very few things are anymore.
Having another three-star chef at the table was no doubt noted by the team. We’d planned to visit the kitchen after the meal to offer our thanks. When we finally stood up, the lunch service was long over. We stepped into the kitchen, only to find it empty, freshly cleaned, still, almost holy in its silence, and the team already gone for a deserved break. We came back later to greet them properly, not for a tour, but a thank-you, a handshake. That, too, felt like part of the rhythm here: serious work with a light touch.
Part of the seriousness is how Mauro moves through the restaurant. He doesn’t greet tables. He surveys them. When he walks, he doesn’t drift, he charts. Every plate matters. Every seat matters. And yet there’s no stiffness. The service is warm but not ingratiating, like a family that knows you well but won’t fuss.
Mauro’s personal history informs this rhythm. He studied industrial engineering before pivoting to hospitality. He taught culinary school for 15 years. He staged with Ferran Adrià and Martín Berasategui, but never used their fame to sell his own. He didn’t receive his third star until 2018, nearly three decades after he started running his restaurant. His rise has been slow by modern standards, which is perhaps why it has been held so gracefully.
And when you watch him - not just how he works, but how he pays attention, you sense that this wasn’t a career so much as a compulsion. He no longer needs to do this. But he still does because there’s always something to refine.
Emotion, Not Recipe
He’s said before, “Grandma is an emotion, not a recipe.” It’s a guiding principle, not a slogan. His cooking is rooted in tradition, but not nostalgia. He’s less interested in preserving flavours than in reactivating the feelings attached to them. Uliassi doesn’t belong to land or sea. It lives in the strip of possibility in between. No symbolic union, just a quiet coexistence. Memory is an ingredient. Emotion is a technique.
And the restaurant reflects that. It’s filled with soft light and strong lines, artwork chosen for mood rather than meaning, corners that feel both domestic and surreal. The space seems to think alongside you, composed in glass and linen, attentive in its silences.
Uliassi, the restaurant gets all the accolades, three Michelin stars, top rankings, and cruise-ship consulting gigs. But Uliassi the man is still here, adjusting the volume, changing the register. Not because he has to. Because he wants to know what else might be said, which emotion might be touched.
He’s showing up, again and again, dish after dish, question after question. Observing. Revising. Still wondering if there’s a better way to serve the best produce of the Adriatic Sea. Still sketching. Still walking through the room, eyes scanning, fingertips barely brushing a chairback, like he’s adjusting the acoustics of a room only he hears.
And if you sit long enough, you begin to hear it, too.
Sipping espresso, thinking
On the terrace after lunch, I try to hold onto the aftertaste. Of cod tripe and marrow, of smoked spaghetti, of a sauce that somehow tasted like low tide and honeysuckle. And then it clicks.
His dishes work like Giacomelli’s prints. The food is the black, dense, deliberate, and emotional. The plate is the negative space, absence as composition. That restraint. That clarity. That sense of something personal, laid bare and then pulled back, just before it breaks.
Maybe that’s what Mauro has been working toward all along. Not a masterpiece. Not a statement. The right line. Like Giacomelli. Stark. Personal. Irreducible.
The food is the black. And Mauro? Still sketching.
Uliassi
Banchina di Levante 6, 60019 Senigallia (AN), Italy
Tel: +39 071 65463
Website: www.uliassi.it
Instagram: @ristoranteuliassi
Accolades
- Three Michelin Stars (since 2019)
- No. 43 – World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025
- 96,5 points at La Liste
- Tre Forchette, 94 points - Gambero Rosso
- No. 12 - OAD Top 100+ European Restaurants
- 3 Knives - Best Chef Awards
3-star Michelin Restaurants of Italy 2025
- Piazza Duomo – Alba (Chef Enrico Crippa)
- Atelier Moessmer – Brunico (Chef Norbert Niederkofler)
- Da Vittorio – Brusaporto (Chef Vittorio Cerea)
- Dal Pescatore – Canneto sull’Oglio (Chef Nadia Santini & family)
- Reale – Castel di Sangro (Chef Niko Romito)
- Enoteca Pinchiorri – Florence (Annie Féolde, Italo Bassi, Riccardo Monco)
- Enrico Bartolini al Mudec – Milan (Chef Enrico Bartolini)
- Osteria Francescana – Modena (Chef Massimo Bottura)
- La Pergola – Rome (Chef Heinz Beck)
- Le Calandre – Rubano (Chef Massimiliano Alajmo)
- Uliassi – Senigallia (Chef Mauro Uliassi)
- Villa Crespi – Orta San Giulio (Chef Antonino Cannavacciuolo)
- Quattro Passi – Marina del Cantone (Chef Antonio Mellino)
- Casa Perbellini 12 Apostoli – Verona (Chef Giancarlo Perbellini)
