By the time we sat down for dinner at Don Camillo, a restaurant in Syracuse, we were exhausted. It wasn’t so much the overnight flight across the Atlantic, or the groggy layover in Milan, or our arrival in Catania, Sicily’s second-largest city and the home of Italy’s most disorganized airport. It was the 40-mile drive to Syracuse. What looks on the map like a quick hop down the coast can be, in practice, a maddening game of chicken played with ferocious Alfa Romeos and sulking trucks, and by the time we had parked our rented Fiat Punto on a quay overlooking the Ionian Sea, we were sapped of our energy and most of our humor.
But when a pair of gamberi rossi appeared, unbidden, the memory of the roundabout by the train station faded away. The peeled raw shrimp were served heads-on, with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of pepper flakes, and the surprisingly delicate flavors unfolded with each bite. My girlfriend, Christine, and I ordered a bottle of Grecanico, a dry and grassy white, which, like many traditional Sicilian wines, isn’t aged in oak. Then we shared a plate of crudo and a bowl of cavati seppie e pistacchi di Bronte, pasta served over cuttlefish ink and topped with a creamy pistachio sauce. The pistachios of Bronte have cult status in this part of Sicily. Smaller and more intensely flavored than conventional pistachios, they’re grown in the volcanic soil of the western face of Mount Etna and are harvested every other year. They find their way into improbable dishes like that pasta, in which their nutty sweetness was an intriguing counterpoint to the rich ink. It wasn’t the last revelation we would experience at what was, essentially, nothing more than a pleasant neighborhood restaurant. My grilled tuna with sweet-pepper marmalade was succulent enough, but Christine’s roasted swordfish was inspired—layered with finocchietto selvatico and wild fennel fronds and wrapped in herb-perfumed lardo, it was subtle and earthy: Sicily’s surf draped in Sicily’s turf.
Sicilian food has a bawdy reputation for big flavors ladled out in truck-driver portions, but in the Val di Noto, as the southeastern corner of the island is known, we found a different kind of cooking, one that was as delicate as it was confident, one in which seemingly incompatible ingredients made perfect sense from the first bite. I knew it could be like this—that a meal in the Val di Noto could be transporting. I’ve also driven in the region often enough to realize that the romantic images of a Sicilian road trip are only half the story—that for every minute you spend zooming past citrus groves and ruined villas, you spend another locked in traffic in an industrial suburb trying to figure out why the “Centro” sign points in two directions.
So we set out from Syracuse early the next morning to give ourselves plenty of time to get to Noto, a Baroque gem that looks as if Versailles had been pulled apart and reassembled as a small Sicilian town. That is, we made sure to arrive in time for lunch at Caffè Sicilia, a seemingly unremarkable pastry shop where Corrado Assenza, a fourth-generation pastry chef with a global reputation, makes some of the most remarkable food on the island, like savory dishes that have the layered structure of desserts. “I have memories of my mother bringing me food when I played in the ocean,” Assenza told us as we worked our way through the salty, fruity, cool flavors of his cozze e il pomodoro, a thin glass of strawberry sorbetto, tomato slices, and raw mussels with their liquor. “When she gave me plums or grapes, I tasted the salt, I tasted the ocean, and I tasted the fruit.” So did we.
The dish didn’t employ the technological gadgets of molecular gastronomy, but as the flavors unfolded, they produced the same gee-whiz astonishment. So did Assenza’s tuna tartare, which was dressed with olive oil and pepper flakes and topped with pistachio flour. He doesn’t use any salt, but what at first bite seemed weird and bland had, by the last, become as complex as it was delicious.
What pistachios are to Bronte, almonds are to Noto. So for dessert we ordered a granita di mandorle, made with nuts harvested from the surrounding hills. Most granitas are flaky, almost crunchy, but Assenza’s was fine, like sand, and a spoonful dissolved on the tongue into a delicate, almost floral aroma of almonds. Before leaving, we stocked up on some of the many prepared foods Assenza sells: candied capers, infused honeys (wild thyme, tobacco), torroni made with Bronte pistachios and Noto almonds. Both of us had packed light -because we knew we’d be bringing back delicious, only-in-Sicily ingredients. I was especially looking forward to returning to Ditta Salvatore Campisi, a harborside warehouse in Marzamemi, an ancient tonnara, or tuna-fishing village, where we bought several rosy slabs of tuna bottarga. (They also had the less-common swordfish bottarga, as well as the all but impossible to find yellowtail bottarga.) With some gesturing we learned a word that’s important to food tourists: sottovuoto, or vacuum packed.
We lugged our loot back to the 18th-century Villa Favorita, a hotel outside Noto, where our room overlooked citrus trees and the distant sea, and then returned to Marzamemi for dinner. Glancing into the kitchen at Taverna La Cialoma was like peeking into somebody’s house—eggplants and tomatoes were piled high in mismatched bowls, and the three cooks, all women, wore aprons over street clothes. We drank Catarrato from juice glasses and worked our way through the antipasto misto: medallions of smoked swordfish, lemon ricotta, fresh sardines, artichokes in agrodolce, and a most unusual bottarga—instead of being pressed, the egg sac had been salted and hung to dry, then breaded and fried, so that when you scraped it with your fork it broke apart like bread crumbs.
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