Quattro Passi has found its next address, and it is four kilometres from the old one.
Gruppo Romeo has taken on the restaurant’s name and its entire team, and will reopen it inside ROMEO Massa Lubrense, the Kengo Kuma resort being built at Punta San Lorenzo. The news reached the Italian trade press on 8 September through a note circulated by the group. Fabrizio Mellino stays as executive chef. His brother Raffaele stays as food and beverage manager.
Nerano, where Quattro Passi made its name, is a frazione of Massa Lubrense. So is the new site. The restaurant is not leaving its comune.
What passes to Romeo, and what does not
The note’s own language is careful, and it is worth repeating rather than paraphrasing: the Mellino family has chosen Romeo to accompany a new season of growth. What has been described as moving across is the Quattro Passi name and the whole team.
No terms have been published. No price, no corporate structure, no date of signature. ROMEO Collection’s own press room carries nothing about it, and the hotel’s page on the group’s site does not mention the Mellinos at all.
The Nerano dining room has been closed since January and did not open for the 2026 season.
What that leaves is a clear operational picture and a vague commercial one. The people are the same. The name is the same. Who owns what, and on what terms, is not on the record.
Punta San Lorenzo, and what is going up there
ROMEO Massa Lubrense sits in a private natural inlet facing Capri, which the group describes in its own material as a fjord. Kengo Kuma and Associates are designing it with ROMEO Design.
Sixty-three rooms and suites, each with a garden and a private pool. Independent villas, also with pools, though the group has not said how many. Two restaurants and three bars. A Sisley Paris spa. Panoramic pools and solarium terraces, an international art collection, a beach club, and a private jetty with yacht mooring.
That jetty is the detail that changes the arithmetic of a stay on this coast. A hotel you can arrive at by boat, on a stretch where the road is the enemy of every timetable, is a different proposition from one you reach through Sorrento traffic in August.
The group has not published operating conditions for the mooring, vessel limits or transfer arrangements.
The date is the softest part of the story
Spring 2027 is the figure in circulation, and the sources attach it to different things.
Pambianco puts spring 2027 on the hotel. Italia a Tavola puts it on the restaurant while saying the hotel opens sooner. Scatti di Gusto says the two coincide and dates them between the end of 2026 and the start of the 2027 season.
The group’s own page for the property says Coming Soon and gives no date whatsoever.
Anyone building a trip around this should treat spring 2027 as the earliest sensible marker and wait for the hotel to publish a first night. Reservations are not open.
Three stars, and the question nobody can answer yet
Quattro Passi took its third Michelin star in November 2023, in the Guida Michelin Italia 2024, under Fabrizio Mellino. It holds three in the current edition, the 2026 guide presented at Parma on 19 November 2025.
Here is the part worth understanding. That edition was published before the Nerano room stopped trading, and stars are awarded to a restaurant at an address. The Italian trade press expects the new site to be assessed on its own, which is the ordinary way the guide works. Michelin has said nothing publicly about it.
The next Italian guide is presented on 12 November 2026 at the Teatro Municipale di Piacenza. That is the first moment anything official can be said, and it falls a season before the restaurant is meant to open.
So the accurate line is the simple one: a three-starred restaurant with its chef and its maitre intact is moving to a new dining room, and the guide will look at the new dining room when there is one to look at.
What a restaurant like this does to a hotel
Most resort restaurants are introduced as one line in a fact sheet. Quattro Passi arrives with an audience that will drive an hour for it.
That changes where the centre of a hotel sits. A dining room people book independently of a bedroom gives the property an evening of its own, and it gives the kitchen a reason to be judged on cooking rather than on room service covers. For the Mellinos, the trade runs the other way: a spa, villas, a beach club and a jetty turn a dinner into a day.
There is a contrast inside the group worth noticing. ROMEO Napoli and ROMEO Roma have both built their culinary identity around Alain Ducasse. Massa Lubrense will put a Campanian restaurant with local roots at the centre instead. Whether the resort’s second restaurant follows the Ducasse line has not been said.
Alfredo Romeo, and the shape of the collection
Gruppo Romeo is controlled by the Neapolitan entrepreneur Alfredo Romeo, who takes the architectural decisions himself. That is visible in the pattern.
ROMEO Napoli was Kenzo Tange. ROMEO Roma, in Palazzo Capponi on Via di Ripetta, was Zaha Hadid Architects. Massa Lubrense is Kengo Kuma. Three properties, three names that would each anchor a museum programme.
Kuma’s idea here is tied to the Japanese notion of ma, the interval between things. In practice the published images show a low building that gives ground to the vegetation and the horizon instead of standing on top of them, which on a protected coastline is the only workable ambition.
What is still missing
The dining room’s capacity has not been published. Nor the menu format, the seasonal calendar, the number of covers, or whether Quattro Passi takes the resort’s principal restaurant from the first night.
With two restaurants announced, the identity of the second is the other thing to watch.
Luxury.it perspective
The continuity is the story. Fabrizio Mellino in the kitchen, Raffaele Mellino in the room, and the cooking of this coast still at the centre of it.
Everything else about this move is bigger: a Kuma building, a Sisley spa, sixty-three rooms and a jetty. Bigger is not automatically better for a restaurant that built its reputation on a small room and a family, and the interesting question in 2027 will be whether the scale around the table changes what arrives on it.
Treat it as a project to follow rather than a stay to book. The first meaningful news will be a published opening night, and after that a reservation line.
Related guides
For the coast either side of it, our Amalfi Coast hotel guide covers the stretch south and the Capri restaurant guide covers the island in the view. Our Michelin guide to Italy tracks the star map as it changes.
For tables on the Sorrento Peninsula this season, boat transfers and villa stays, contact Luxury.it Concierge.
