A tasty slice of authentic Italy has sprung up on a quiet corner of Dockyard.
Traditional Azure cuisine is being served up just the way it would be back in the streets of Venice or Rome.
And the healthy hustle, bustle and sweet smells of an Italian eatery provide the perfect backdrop to enjoy the fantastic food.
Café Amici — as the name suggests — is a place for friends to gather and enjoy great food.
It is the brainchild of Livio Ferigo, who runs the highly successful Bone Fish restaurant nearby, and it is already creating quite a stir at the West End of the island.
Mr. Ferigo said: “This is a place where friends and family can meet and have a great time.
“We want people to relax and enjoy the atmosphere we have tried to create with the décor and the decorations.
“And of course we want them to enjoy the lovely food.
“It is all about the Italian experience at a reasonable price which I think is what a lot of people are looking for at the moment when they are watching their dollars a little more closely.”
Café Amici is a project that is very close to Mr. Ferigo’s heart.
The walls are adorned with paintings of his beloved hometown of Forni di Sopra.
And some of the recipes are the ones his mother used to cook for him when he was a young boy growing up in Italy. He added: “We have been extremely well received so far and that has been very pleasing.
“We are the first Italian restaurant in Dockyard so we are providing something new and fresh.
“But for me the most important thing is the food and the atmosphere inside the restaurant.
“We are trying to create a little bit of Italy in Bermuda and I am very happy with how it has turned out.
“A lot of people have put a lot of work into Café Amici — and I am very grateful to them all.
“The local custom has also been very positive in the feed back we have received so far.”
The Italian eatery only opened a couple of months ago but already word of its homemade pizzas and traditional lasagne has started to spread across the island.
Mr. Ferigo recruited the help of an Italian pizza chef to help train the chefs at Café Amici on how to make the perfect pizza.
And he is never far from the kitchen himself to make sure the dishes going to the tables are top notch.
He said: “We offer an all-day menu of breakfast, lunch and dinner and I think that is something new and exciting for people who live up in Dockyard and the West End but also for the tourists that come in on the cruise ships every day.
“My parents lived close to Venice and many of the recipes we use are just like the ones my mom used to make.
“And the whole reason for getting the Italian pizza chef in was to make sure we were offering authentic and traditional Italian food to our customers.” The Café Amici breakfast menu is a sumptuous collection of bagels, pancakes, waffles and eggs of all shapes and sizes.
You can also chose from wraps and muffins as well as codfish and potatoes on Sunday morning.
For lunch there is the difficult decision of choosing between the homemade pizzas, traditional pastas, healthy salads, ravioli and risottos.
While the dinner menu is more geared towards the chicken, steak and fish dishes — but there is no reason you cannot make your choice from the extensive pasta or pizza options.
A long list of crisp Italian wines are available too to wash down the tasty food. Mr. Ferigo said: “In many ways it is a completely different restaurant to Bone Fish in terms of the size, the food we are serving and the atmosphere we are trying to create.
“But we are after the same level of success here that we have enjoyed at Bone Fish – it is going well so far.”