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Restaurants Overview

Sicilian cuisine reflects the island's unique cultural mix, imaginatively combining fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts with Italian pastas and Arab and North African ingredients such as couscous. Sweet and sour tastes are deftly mingled, and cooks have distinctive touches.

In Sicily, you'll enjoy the freshest seafood in all of Italy. Grilled tonno (tuna) and triglie (red mullet) are reliable coastal staples. King, however, is pesce spada (swordfish), best enjoyed marinated (marinato), smoked (affumicato), or as the traditional involtini di pesce spada (swordfish roulades). Delicate ricci (sea urchins), are a specialty of Mondello, near Palermo, and spaghetti alla Norma, with a sauce of tomato, fried eggplant, ricotta, and basil, call Catania home.

Desserts from Sicily are famous, none more than the wonderful cannoli, whose delicate pastry shell and just-sweet-enough ricotta barely resemble their foreign impostors. The traditional Easter cake is the cassata siciliana, a rich sponge cake with candied fruit and marzipan. From behind bakery windows and glass cases beam tiny marzipan sweets, bizarrely fashioned into brightly colored apples, cherries, hamburgers, and even prosciutto. Granita, the world's first ice cream, is said to have been made by the Romans from the snow on the slopes of Mount Etna.