TheFork published its 48 nominees for 2026 on 7 September.
This is the eighth edition of the award, run with Identita Golose and with Mastercard as title sponsor, and it does one thing the Italian guides do not: it looks only at restaurants that have opened, changed hands, changed chef or changed concept recently. A place that has been good for fifteen years is not eligible. That narrows the field to the part of the map that moved this year.
Public voting is open until 20 September. The ceremony is on 27 October at the Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber in Milan.
How the list is built
A jury of chefs puts the names forward. The award site says more than seventy Italian top chefs; the press material says 74, Italian and international. Either way it is the largest chef jury in Italian dining.
The mechanism is often described as one chef, one restaurant. It does not work that way in practice, and the 2026 list makes that obvious: several nominees carry five, six or seven nominating chefs behind them. That overlap is the most useful signal in the whole document, because it shows where the profession agrees.
Voting is one entry per user and per email address, and it decides the People’s Choice Award. Cristina Parodi hosts the evening, with a dinner cooked by the Cerea brothers, Giancarlo Perbellini and Riccardo Monco. Alongside the main prize there are the Mastercard Impact Award, now in its second year, the Creators’ Choice Award in its fifth, and a New Generation Award.
The three the chefs agreed on
Count the nominations and three names come out ahead.
Sextantio, at Santo Stefano di Sessanio in Abruzzo, drew seven: Donato Ascani, Gennaro Esposito, Michele Lazzarini, Claudio Mengoni, Franco Pepe, Niko Romito and Arcangelo Tinari. The restaurant sits inside the albergo diffuso at 1,200 metres in the Gran Sasso national park and opened on 3 November 2025. Dino Como cooks there. He is 36, from Palena in the province of Chieti, and spent fifteen years with Niko Romito at Reale, where he specialised in bread. His two menus are Radici, built from agro-pastoral recipes researched with the Museo delle Genti d’Abruzzo across more than seventy oral accounts, and Evoluzione, ten courses at 110 euro.
Thelema at Gaggiano, twenty minutes south-west of Milan, drew six: Andrea Berton, Simone Cantafio, Alessandro Negrini, Fabio Pisani, Giancarlo Perbellini and Sara Scarsella. Simone Tricarico is chef and owner. He trained with Ducasse, Pascal Barbot, Michel Roux and Seiji Yamamoto, and was executive chef at Iyo in Milan before opening in October 2025. Thirty seats. A rule of no more than four elements on a plate. Tasting menus at 56 euro for four courses and 68 for five, which is not a Milan number.
Nomos Ante in Rome drew five: Gabriele Boffa, Anthony Genovese, Luca Pezzetta, Ciro Scamardella and Domenico Stile. It is the dining room of the Nomos Hotel on Via di San Paolo alla Regola, a sixteenth-century Franciscan monastery converted to 31 rooms. Nine tables, 28 covers, three rooms, dinner only from Tuesday to Saturday. Giulio Zoli is Roman, 35, and spent six years with Genovese before Alex Atala in Sao Paulo and Yannick Alleno in Paris. Menus run from Arche at 75 euro to Telos at 125.
Where the 48 are
Lombardy takes ten places, more than any other region, and four of those are in Milan proper. Trentino-Alto Adige has five. Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, Piemonte and Puglia have four each. Tuscany has three.
Five regions have nobody at all this year: Veneto, Marche, Umbria, Molise and Valle d’Aosta. Neither TheFork nor the jury has explained the gap, and in a year when Venice has opened as much as it has, the Veneto absence is the one that will be discussed.
Some of the names will already be familiar. Antesi, at Belmond Villa San Michele in Florence, is nominated for Alessandro Cozzolino’s cooking. Langosteria is on the list for its Montenapoleone room in Milan. Denis Lovatel, who brought his mountain pizza down from Alano di Piave, was put forward by Carlo Cracco. And 1224 at the Grand Hotel Savoia in Cortina arrives in the same season as the town’s newest hotel.
What the list says about how Italy is eating
TheFork reads two patterns in its own nominees, and both hold up against the names.
The first is the contemporary osteria: tradition reinterpreted, at a price people can pay more than once a year. Nino in Milan, Spirito Osteria in Turin and Aurea in Cagliari all sit there.
The second is the vertical format, where one address holds a bistrot, a wine and meat counter and a cocktail bar without pretending they are separate businesses. ALTO in Cervia and Fiammetta Brace Bar in Turin are built that way.
Underneath both is the same shift. Fewer dinners out, more spent on each one, and an expectation of local identity even in a room with paper napkins.
Last year the public vote went to Adelaide! Bottega Bar in Turin, put forward by Ugo Alciati. Cecchini in Citta took the centre of Italy and Mezzena took the south and the islands.
How to use the list
Treat it as a booking document rather than a ranking. The Michelin selections tell you where the country’s best kitchens are; the guide’s August additions covered that ground. This list tells you which new rooms fifty or seventy chefs have already eaten in and thought worth their name.
The three at the top of the nomination count are the ones to book now, and Sextantio is the hardest of them, because it has 1,200 metres of mountain and a small dining room working against you. Thelema is the value. Nomos Ante is the one to hold for a Roman weekend, and it pairs with the rest of what Rome opened this summer.
Luxury.it perspective
The value of this list is not the prize. It is the overlap.
When seven chefs who compete with each other put the same mountain dining room forward, they are telling you something no guide inspection can, because they ate there on their own night off and paid for it. Sextantio, Thelema and Nomos Ante are the three that cleared that bar in 2026, and all three opened within eight weeks of each other last autumn.
Book those three before the ceremony on 27 October, not after. A People’s Choice Award has never made a table easier to get.
Related guides
For the wider Italian restaurant year, our Michelin guide to Italy and Identita Golose in Milan cover the two other calendars worth following.
For reservations at any of the 48, including the rooms that take bookings only by phone, contact Luxury.it Concierge.
