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In 2000–2001, this bastion of fine Milanese cooking was completely overhauled and reopened under the guidance of Carlo Cracco, who once worked in Alain Ducasse’s fabled Montecarlo restaurant. You will find wonderful classics here, including risotto or cotoletta alla milanese and ossobuco (see Culinary Highlights of Lombardy). If the stratospheric prices make you cringe, know that just around the corner at Via Spadari 9 is plain old “Peck”, one of the finest food emporia in Italy, where raw ingredients and prepared dishes can make up a glorious picnic.

Milan’s youngest deluxe hotel has surprised a jaded public by creating two superlative restaurants. The better of the two is the more refined basement eatery where chef Sergio Mei oversees creative Mediterranean dishes. The degustazione (tasting) menu is magnificent.

Classic Milanese cooking doesn’t get much more fundamental, or much better, than this. Service is dour but good-natured, and the menu is simple. You can even get by just with the risotto e ossobuco , a half-portion of each staple dish on one plate for a low price.

Swiss chef-owner Pietro Leeman spent time in the Orient before opening Milan’s temple of vegetarian cuisine, and many of his dishes have a hint of the exotic that put them in a gourmet category. The wine list is joined by a selection of ciders and organic beers.

Set at the foot of its namesake iron bridge over a canal, this Navigli standby boasts on its menu: “Good cooking is a friend of the good life and an enemy of a hurried one”. You can ponder this over a long, satisfying meal.

Aimo and Nadia Moroni are acknowledged as the top chefs in all Milan. They are fanatical about hunting down the very best ingredients, and it shows in such delectables as risotto with pumpkin flowers and truffles. It’s a bit of a haul from the centre of the city, but it is very much worth it.

The setting is marvellous: beyond the historic Liberty-style villa (now a hotel) where D’Annunzio lived and Mussolini’s mistress spent her final days, the tables are scattered about a shaded terrace lapped by lake waters. The cuisine is inventive and international, if sometimes overly minimalist (see Villa Fiordaliso, Gardone Riviera).

For more than 150 years, the Brovelli family has run an inn and osteria in the tiny lakeside village of Ranco. The restaurant – serving high-class creative cuisine – has summertime seating on shaded terraces. The wine list stupefies with more than 1,200 choices, and they’ll set up a wine tasting to accompany your degustazione (tasting) menu.

Restaurants in such touristy towns as Bellagio rarely rise to the level of quality that this has achieved under chef-owner Armando Valli and his assistant Davide Angelini. The signature dish is the sinfonia degli otto sapori del lago , a “symphony” of eight lake fishes. For dessert, try the traditional paradel – honey ice cream with raisins (see Barchetta, Bellagio).

Barchetta exterior

Here, when the weather is fine, you can dine on the terracotta terrace high in the hills above Iseo, with a view across a rose-fringed lawn to forested mountains beyond. The cooking is superb, and makes wonderful use of lake fish and other fresh local ingredients (see I Due Roccoli, Iseo, Lake Iseo).

Lake fish