The table
Fradis Minoris
Pula · Sardinia
A one-star dining room out on the Laguna di Nora, on the south coast of Sardinia below the ruins of ancient Nora, where Francesco Stara cooks what the lagoon and the southern sea give up that morning, in a kitchen that carries a Michelin Green Star for the way it sources and wastes almost nothing.
Sardinian, read through one lagoon. Francesco Stara has cooked at Fradis Minoris since 2020, in a dining room set on the water of the Laguna di Nora, a few hundred metres along the isthmus from the car park, with the Punic and Roman ruins of Nora and an old coastal watchtower in view. He works almost entirely from what is close: fish from the lagoon and the southern Sardinian sea, wild herbs gathered from the water's edge, vegetables from small growers in the Campidano plain behind the coast. There is a single tasting menu, and it changes with the day's catch rather than running off a fixed card. The kitchen uses the whole fish, fillet and belly, bones and scale, so that very little leaves as waste, and the list keeps to small Sardinian producers, with the sommelier pairing across the island rather than reaching for the obvious bottles. It is cooking tied to one stretch of coast and the season running through it, closer to the water it sits on than to any grammar of fine dining brought in from elsewhere.
It holds one Michelin star in the Michelin Guide Italia, and a Michelin Green Star for sustainability that it has kept for three years running. The green star is the part that interests VANE: a kitchen built on its own lagoon, fishing the water it sits on and foraging the herbs at its edge, with the vegetables coming from small growers in the plain behind, and a near-zero-waste discipline cooked into the menu rather than printed on it. The setting makes the rest of the case, a restaurant inside a protected lagoon beside one of Sardinia's great ancient sites, open only through the warm months and working to what the season and the catch allow. It adds Sardinia to the collection, an island VANE had not yet reached. A researched profile, drawn from the restaurant's own record and Michelin's listing, not a first-hand VANE visit.
Fradis Minoris, Laguna di Nora, Nora, Pula, southern Sardinia.
Chef Francesco Stara, cooking at the lagoon since 2020.
Sardinian, built on the lagoon and the southern sea, near-zero waste.
A single tasting menu that changes with the day's catch.
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