Inside La Stüa de Michil: A Conversation with Chef Simone Cantafio on Michelin-Starred Dining in the Dolomites
Why Serious Skiers Plan Around the Table
Most North American skiers arrive in the Alps with the same unexamined assumption: the mountain is the main event, and everything else — the food, the wine, the table — exists in support of it. A burger at noon, a beer at the base lodge, and back to the lifts. It's a reasonable model. It's also how you miss something extraordinary.
For skiers planning a trip to Alta Badia, the most consequential reservation you'll make has nothing to do with ski school or lift access. It has to do with where you eat. And at the top of that short list, for anyone who takes both skiing and dining seriously, is La Stüa de Michil at Hotel La Perla in Corvara, one of the few genuine Michelin star dining experiences in the Italian Dolomites.
I sat down recently with Simone Cantafio, executive chef at La Stüa de Michil since 2020. What follows is not a profile in the conventional sense — it's an education in how one kitchen thinks about cooking, place, and the relationship between the two.
The menu: “The Earth is Alive”
A Lineage Built on Restraint
Cantafio's culinary formation reads like a deliberate study in subtraction. He spent his formative years with Gualtiero Marchesi — Italy's first three-Michelin-star chef — who inscribed a phrase on the kitchen wall that stayed with Cantafio for decades: "The example is the most important form of teaching." Marchesi's lesson about cooking was equally direct: build a dish with four or five elements, cook them well, and finish with a thoughtful sauce. Less architecture, more clarity.
That philosophy found its parallel when Cantafio moved to Hokkaido, where he led the kitchen originally founded by Michel Bras and worked alongside Sébastien Bras for eleven years. A tempura master there drew the contrast plainly: in Asia, a high-level dish is defined by what you remove; in Europe, by what you add. Cantafio absorbed the Asian logic. Today, his preference runs toward fewer, more powerful ingredients, precisely chosen, exceptional in quality, speaking for themselves.
Photo: Gourmet Ski Safari 2025 ©Manuel Glira
Why the Dolomites
The choice of Corvara was not accidental. Cantafio's first encounter with this corner of the Italian Alps came roughly a decade ago, during a season with three-Michelin-star chef Norbert Niederkofler, whose restaurant is a few kilometers from La Perla. The place stayed with him. When the opportunity at La Stüa de Michil arrived in 2020, he understood what the mountains offered that a city kitchen couldn't: real seasons, with real intensity.
He changes his menu every season. Not as a marketing exercise, but because the land genuinely changes around him. Michel Bras's guiding principle — that “nature speaks and experience translates” — is not rhetoric at La Stüa de Michil. It is operational. The Dolomites, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, deliver a different pantry each season: spring herbs, summer mushrooms, autumn game, winter roots.
His kitchen isn't purely Alpine. Born in Milan to a Calabrian family, married to a Japanese wife, and shaped by years in France and Hokkaido, Cantafio describes his food as local ingredients seen through an international lens. The result is one of the more distinctive approaches to fine dining in Corvara, or anywhere in the Dolomites.
The best tortellini in broth you’ve ever enjoyed.
The Incö Table — Dolomites Farm-to-Table at Its Most Direct
One of the more interesting things Cantafio has built at La Stüa de Michil is a concept called Incö: "today" in Ladin, the ancient Rheto-Romance language spoken in the Alta Badia and nearby valleys. The premise is simple and slightly radical: a single table, set apart from the main dining room, where the menu is decided each morning based on what local farmers and fishermen have brought in. Guests don't know what they're eating until it arrives.
The concept solves a real problem. Small-production suppliers — a fisherman with a single trout, a farmer with one pork belly — couldn't supply at the scale of a 30-seat tasting menu. Rather than turn away what they brought, Cantafio created a format built around scarcity. The Incö table is now the most direct expression of Alta Badia terroir available in Corvara, and arguably the most compelling reason to book La Stüa de Michil over any other restaurant in the Dolomites for a guest who wants to understand where they actually are.
From the first sip to the last, La Stüa de Michil is all pleasure and reward.
Skiing and Fine Dining in Italy — The Broader Point
If you're planning a winter trip to Alta Badia and haven't thought about where you'll dine with the same seriousness you've given to which runs you'll ski, you're leaving the best part of the trip unplanned. The best restaurants in Alta Badia for skiers aren't afterthoughts. They are the reason discerning guests return, season after season, when a dozen other resorts would do just as well on snow alone.
La Stüa de Michil requires a reservation. Book it well in advance.
Eat Drink Fun specializes in bespoke itinerary planning for skiing and dining in the Italian Dolomites and Austrian Arlberg.
Book a consultation at eatdrinkfun.com/book-a-consultation.
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