A FORMER SHIPYARD
The Place
THE HISTORY
Upstairs, above the port
The building at 51 Quai Jérôme-Comparetti was a shipyard during Genoese rule. It is upstairs, in a vaulted room five meters high, that Finestra opened in June 2023.
The window overlooking the marina was enlarged into a semicircle bay. It gave the house its name — window, the window — and its twenty-five-cover view.
ARCHITECTURE
Where nothing is left to chance
The window
The golden propellers
The hammered mirror
A monumental piece that responds to the movements of the sea and extends the port's light to the back of the room.
THE ARCHITECTS
Gardera-Pastre
Nicolas Panzani met Patrice Gardera and Philippe Pastre in Indonesia, years before imagining the first of its restaurants. The two architects have since designed all four establishments of the group.
This continuity explains the kinship one feels from one address to the next without ever finding the exact same decor twice. Each house has its own design; it is the attention given to materials and craftsmen that connects them.
At Finestra, the vaulted room was treated like the interior of a ship. The wooden ceiling mimics the shape of a hull. The two propellers rotating above the tables were gilded with fine 22-carat gold byAtelier Gohard.
The palette extends this idea without ever overstating it: the ochre of the walls, the fine gold of the blades, the light oak of the tables. In the background, the hammered stainless steel wall diffuses the orange light of the port into the room.
- ArchitectureAtelier Gardera-Pastre
- GildingAtelier Gohard
- OpeningJune 2023
- Capacity25 covers
TWENTY-FIVE COVERS
One room, one evening
Finestra only opens in the evening and sets just twenty-five covers. This is not an imposed constraint but a choice: at this scale, every table can be attended to from start to finish of the service.
On the ground floor of the same building, D’Amore and Da Passano live side by side—three tables, three registers, one single establishment.