Hotel La Perla in South Tyrol.
Hotel La Perla
In 1956, Ernesto Costa needed a name for his new guesthouse on the spot. He grabbed a phone book off a bar counter and picked one out of the Rimini listings, Albergo La Perla. He never once visited the place he named it after. Seventy years later, Hotel La Perla is still family-owned, in a town most visitors skip for some of the Italian Dolomites’ more flashy towns, such as Cortina.
This valley’s everyday language isn’t Italian. It’s Ladin, which took shape when Roman soldiers’ Latin mixed with the speech of the Rhaetians who already lived in these mountains. Around 30,000 people still speak it, across five valleys ringing the Sella massif, Corvara included. It’s one of three official languages in South Tyrol, alongside German and Italian.
While skiing and hiking are next level here, beyond the outdoor adventuring, if you’re serious about eating and drinking well this is one of the most delicious addresses in the Dolomites — and where you’ll find the culinary genius that is chef Simone Cantafio in the kitchen at one-Michelin-starred La Stüa de Michil .
Here are a few reasons why:
Les Stües at Hotel La Perla.
Hotel La PerlaSeventy years of the same family
Michil Costa, Ernesto’s son, now runs Casa Costa 1956, a small collection across the Dolomites and Tuscany. La Perla remains the flagship, the first Leading Hotels of the World member in South Tyrol and still independently owned. You’ll often find the family themselves around the hotel, Michil and his son Mathias among them, greeting guests or hosting the weekly welcome reception, snacks and sparkling wine included.
Cantafio carries that same instinct into the kitchen, for his own family. There’s a risotto dedicated to his late mother, Patty. “I lost my mother when I was twenty-five, yet her memory continues to live on every day in my kitchen,” he says. “Because cooking, before it is technique, is an act of love,” he adds. “Every time I hear the name ‘Mama Patty’ spoken in the kitchen, I feel she’s close.”
Chef Simone Cantafio’s salad at La Stüa de Michil.
Hotel La PerlaChef Simone Cantafio’s cooking
Cantafio trained eleven years under Michel Bras in France, ran the Bras family’s two-Michelin-starred Toya on Hokkaido, and then returned home from Japan to head La Perla’s Michelin-starred La Stüa de Michil in 2020. His deep-water grey grouper carries his whole résumé on one plate. “Cooking it properly is an exercise in sensitivity and respect,” he says. “Alongside it, small Mediterranean vegetable garnishes—such as a baby lettuce heart with anchovy milk—pay tribute to my Calabrian heritage. Completing the dish is a sea hunter-style sauce, intense and perfectly balanced, embodying French rigor.”
Ask him about summer produce specifically and he brings up a different dish entirely, one called From the Garden to the Morning. It’s built on a lesson from Bras, that no two carrots should be cooked the same way. “This philosophy takes shape in a dish composed of around fifty different vegetables, each cut, cooked, and seasoned in its own unique way,” he says. “What I love most is that a seemingly simple dish such as a salad can become a manifesto of a territory.”
For one of the Dolomites’ most interesting reservations
Tucked into La Stüa de Michil’s private Weinstube is Incö, a table for two to six where the menu isn’t written until the morning of, solely designed around what local farmers bring in. The name means “today” in Ladin. “And today is precisely the moment when an ingredient reaches its highest expression,” Cantafio says.
A recent dish was an authentic lamb navarin, cuts of neck and shank. “We paired them with Harald’s young carrots, Agostino’s spring onions, and Ivan’s fresh peas,” he says. Guests don’t find out what they’re eating until it arrives. Cantafio turned the whole project into a book in 2025, INCÖ, la Terra è Viva, organized by day of the week in Ladin with each chapter built around a specific farmer, fisherman or forager he works with — including Günther, a farmer from Val di Funes and one of Cantafio’s favorite mountain characters, who supplies ancient local grains.
Mahatma wine cellar.
Hotel La PerlaThirty thousand bottles in the Mahatma cellar
The hotel’s Mahatma cellar holds, by its own count, the largest private collection of Sassicaia in the world, alongside some 30,000 bottles across 3,000 labels. Michil Costa built it himself, bottle by bottle, and the cellar still plays the same music he listened to while cataloguing it. “It is a way of preserving not only the bottles but also the soul and history of this special place,” the wine cellar and sommelier team says.
Diners can book a thirty-minute tour before dinner, led by someone from the sommelier team, through a maze of stone chambers wired for sound and light, each one dedicated to a different region, Champagne, Burgundy and Barolo. The grand finale is the Sassicaia room, which holds a bottle from every vintage since 1968, the wine’s debut year, the most complete run outside Tuscany itself.
Breakfast.
Hotel La PerlaA different mood for every night
Bistrot & Music Club is the liveliest of the four, built around cocktails and live music, with a menu that moves between Mediterranean plates and South Tyrolean classics. Les Stües (the rooms in Ladin) entails six connected 1600s parlors, wood-paneled and candlelit, that once served as the living rooms of a Ladin house. Here there are two four-course menus each night, one fixed and one that changes daily, created around local, organic South Tyrolean ingredients.
L’Murin runs the liveliest après-ski in these parts in winter and turns into a beer garden with a stellar burger and brews in summer. And obviously La Stüa de Michil holds the Michelin star, and carries Michil Costa’s own name. And if you’re still hungry, the family runs a fifth restaurant at Berghotel Ladinia, their historic inn a few minutes walk down the road.
Hotel La Perla.
Hotel La Perla
While you don’t technically need a room to enjoy these delicious bits, since all four restaurants take outside reservations, it’s wise to allocate at least one night. The rooms are furnished with pieces that have belonged to the family for generations, ceramic cups, old typewriters and original headboards among them. Stay over and breakfast becomes another feast entirely on its own. Luckily, it’s the Dolomites, so whatever the season, there’s a hike or a ski run to work up an appetite before the next meal.
