Ristorante Ciak

The Monterosso Experience
We often come across herds of tourists that want to see our town in just five minutes and then scurry off to another one. This is surely not the right way to understand and discover Cinque Terre as it truly is. We suggest seeing less things of higher importance than more things that aren’t as significant. Make sure to spend your time in a way that will most benefit your overall experience.
Get lost in our town without an iPhone or Rick Steve’s book, drink some of the famous local wine on the beach, and always take the paths less traveled; those are the ones that will take your breath away.
To have an authentic and memorable experience here, you need to be a part of the town rather than an outside spectator. Even a short time immersed in the life of Monterosso can result in memories that will last a lifetime.


Tour Guides & Our Business
We often come across herds of tourists that want to see our town in just five minutes and then scurry off to another one. This is surely not the right way to understand and discover Cinque Terre as it truly is. We suggest seeing less things of higher importance than more things that aren’t as significant. Make sure to spend your time in a way that will most benefit your overall experience.
Get lost in our town without an iPhone or Rick Steve’s book, drink some of the famous local wine on the beach, and always take the paths less traveled; those are the ones that will take your breath away.
To have an authentic and memorable experience here, you need to be a part of the town rather than an outside spectator. Even a short time immersed in the life of Monterosso can result in memories that will last a lifetime.


Trip Advisor
We are always looking at online reviews as a positive thing. They are a tool for us to use in order to improve our restaurant, but lately they have made us a little perplexed.
Looking at Trip Advisor, the most famous review web site, we found ourselves at the bottom of the Monterosso restaurant chart in just a few months. This left us asking ourselves a lot of questions in order to better understand our ranking. We know that we are not perfect but many bad reviews are more critical than the reality.
Since the birth of Trip Advisor in 2000, we have had around 195,000 costumers with only 400 of those posting reviews. Though a lot of them are very negative, in truth they represent only 0.002% of our total customers, which is a very inconsistent percentage. However, it is still able to influence customer choices.
We have never asked for any of those bad reviews to be removed, however we have definitely found many of them to be illogical and irrational in many ways.
We have also noticed some restaurants weighing in at the number one spot that were seemingly non-existent just three months ago. Every month we are contacted by marketing businesses offering services to bring us to the top of the charts… how? I don’t know, use your imagination…
Our restaurant is located in a little town, so people see all of their restaurant choices in just a short amount of time. This can be a negative thing because a lot of people use the internet when deciding where to eat.
Though these things seem unfair and problematic, it is all part of the restaurant industry. Just like every other industry, there is always more to it than meets the eye. All we can do is continue to improve our business and hope that word of mouth will remain stronger than the power of the internet.
Bon appetit!

A Word About Tipping
In Italy, table service is already included in the check! We often find that costumers don’t know this and end up leaving tips that are far too high.Of course we value honesty and always ask the foreign costumers if they know how it works here in Italy. Many are surprised after we explain this to them and some of them say, “ No one never told me!” This happening can often result in a more expensive bill and not very happy customers. Here in Italy we do still leave tips, with a much lower percentage of course. Those are always welcome.


Suggestions for Your Plate
It all really depends on how hungry you are...
If you want to eat a lot, you can start with a mouthwatering mixed fish appetizer (salted anchovies, marinated swordfish, little shrimps&beans, stuffed mussels, etc), followed by a good-looking dish of pasta (perhaps our home made gnocchi topped with pesto), and finish it off with some of our delicious pannacotta.
If you are wanting something quick, light, and inexpensive, you can have the seafood spaghetti with a glass of a local white wine and finish it off with one of our homemade desserts.