The most revealing dish at a-Ma-Re Capri costs €46 and is a seafood salad. What makes it interesting is what the kitchen put in it: ‘o pere e ‘o musso, the pork and veal offal sold from carts in the back streets of Naples.
At this Jumeirah Capri Palace restaurant on the Anacapri coast, that tells you what the kitchen is after. The sea supplies the setting. Naples supplies the appetite. A guest can take a long lunch in sight of the Blue Grotto without eating the meal that any expensive Mediterranean terrace would serve them.
The credits have changed, and this matters if you are working from older articles. The summer 2026 menu names Salvatore Elefante as executive chef, Nicola Giovanni Maiello as resident chef, Stefania Trofa as restaurant manager, and Pizzaingrammi as, in its words, the author of the pizza. Franco Pepe, who was credited with the pizzas when the restaurant launched in 2024, appears nowhere on the current menu or on Jumeirah’s current pages. Plan around the team printed today.
The dish that explains Maiello’s cooking
“We want to reawaken a memory,” Maiello told Serena Curto of Identità Golose on 14 September. The plate he built around that line runs to lupini, celery, squid, green olives, octopus, lemon and sea fennel picked off the Capri cliffs, with the offal among them. It reads as a Neapolitan street memory reassembled on an island that mostly sells a different story about itself.
The appeal is the contrast. In a room this expensive, an ingredient does not need an expensive origin to earn its place, and a chef who argues for an overlooked cut is doing something more interesting than shielding every guest from surprise.
It will not suit everyone. The menu prints the dish as “Insalata di mare, o’ per e o’ muss con lupini gialli”, which is honest and completely opaque to most visitors. Ask before ordering, especially if someone at the table expects a seafood salad to contain seafood and nothing else.
We are reading the menu and the chef’s own account here. Texture, seasoning and the cooking on the night belong to your table rather than to this page.
What the 2026 menu costs
Jumeirah publishes the summer 2026 menu in full, so the bill holds no mystery. A selection, read on 15 September.
| Dish or section | Price |
|---|---|
| Uovo alla Genovese | €28 |
| Mozzarella di bufala with tomato varieties | €34 |
| Linguine alla Nerano | €36 |
| Polpo | €42 |
| Insalata di mare with ‘o pere e ‘o musso | €46 |
| Frittura di paranza | €50 |
| Every pizza in the Pizzaingrammi section | €30 |
| Every dessert | €28 |
Two flat prices are worth noticing. All ten pizzas cost €30 and all five desserts cost €28, so neither section needs arithmetic. The menu footer states that VAT and the cover charge are already inside those figures, which is not true of every restaurant on this island. Drinks are separate.
Do the sums before you go. Two people sharing a starter and taking a pizza each land near €110 before drinks; the same two working through starters, pasta and dessert are closer to €200. Decide which lunch you came for, and then do not book an elaborate dinner on top of it.
Pizza is part of the restaurant, not a separate identity
The pizzas give the table room to move. One person can eat lightly while another works through the kitchen, and nobody has to apologise. That makes the place useful for a group that has been together since breakfast and has stopped agreeing about food.
It also changes how to read the coverage. a-Ma-Re has never been a pizzeria with a view, and it is no longer the restaurant those 2024 launch pieces described. Kitchen, pizza list and bar now work as one menu.
Order for contrast. Pick the kitchen-led meal or the lighter shared table. Lunch does not have to prove the whole menu.
Leave time for the drinks list
The bar list carries the same Neapolitan references as the kitchen, and its signature section is not an afterthought priced to match. Check the current cocktail prices when you book; they sit well above what the same drink costs in Capri town.
Treat the aperitivo as its own decision rather than a rounding error inside the lunch estimate. For friends catching up, a drink and a simple plate often beats the full sequence.
A good drinks list is not a promise of a party. Ask what the atmosphere is like on your date, whether anything is playing, and which terrace positions are actually available.
A table books you a table, and nothing else
Jumeirah’s restaurant page lists lunch from 12.30pm to 3.30pm and dinner from 7.30pm to 11pm, closed Monday evening and all day Tuesday. The dress code depends on which language you read: the English page says smart casual, the Italian one relaxed casual. Dress for the stricter of the two. The menu is headed summer 2026, so confirm the season before booking an autumn table.
Book through the Jumeirah Capri Palace reservations team rather than a third-party listing, and say which a-Ma-Re you mean. Jumeirah runs a restaurant of the same name at Al Naseem in Dubai, with a similar Neapolitan pitch, and the two collide constantly in search results. Jumeirah publishes map coordinates for the Anacapri restaurant but no street address; the guidance about how you reach it, on foot or by water, should come from the hotel.
One warning that saves an argument on the day. Jumeirah’s pages say nothing about sunbeds, sea access or a tender, so a table books you a table. Anyone arriving by boat needs to arrange the landing separately, and hotel guests should remember that this restaurant sits down on the coast, not in the Capri Palace dining room up in Anacapri.
Where it fits in a Capri stay
a-Ma-Re earns its place for something specific: a Neapolitan kitchen in an expensive coastal setting that has not edited out the humble ingredients. Il Riccio, the hotel’s other restaurant up in Anacapri, shares an executive chef with it and holds a Michelin star, which makes the two worth planning as separate evenings rather than alternatives.
Come curious about the food as well as the view. Ask what is good that day. The best thing on the table may well be the ingredient you would not have ordered.
The Luxury.it perspective
A €46 seafood salad containing pork and veal offal is a small act of nerve on an island that sells lemons and linguine to everybody. Maiello could have served a clean plate of langoustines at the same price and nobody would have complained.
The pricing tells its own story. Ten pizzas at a flat €30, five desserts at a flat €28, VAT and coperto already inside. That is a restaurant that has decided not to make you calculate, which on Capri counts as hospitality.
Our reservation, if we were choosing: the salad, one pizza, one bottle, and the afternoon left alone. Book Il Riccio for a different day.
Related guides
Our Capri restaurant guide sets out the wider choice of evenings on the island.
