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.
The food you find on the Iblean Plateau, in the arid heart of the Val di Noto, is different from what you find on the coast, even though you can drive from one to the other in 30 minutes. Here pork is king, specifically the Nero dei Nebrodi, a black pig that’s close in size and flavor to wild boar; and pork was the reason why we pointed the Fiat toward Frigintini the following afternoon. We were headed for a restaurant called Maria Fidone, but it became clear as soon as we set foot inside that the place was closed. Fidone herself came out of the kitchen to explain that she was only open for dinner, but after sighing heavily she told us that maybe she could find us something to eat. Then she led us to the empty dining room, where four schoolchildren were watching cartoons, and left us with two glasses and a bottle of Frappato, a light-bodied red wine that’s exactly what you want with a meaty lunch.
I peeked into the kitchen, where Fidone was busy mixing eggs into flour and readying a pasta machine. Soon we were all watching cartoons and eating fresh arancini, breaded rice balls as light as meringues. A plate arrived with different kinds of dried sausages and cheeses, and then another with cracked olives. Next came the pasta—fluffy ravioli filled with lemon-spiked ricotta and brought to the table with a bowl of pork ragù—and then Fidone emerged with a bowl of braised pork belly and shoulder and fresh pork sausage. She looked surprised when, at the end of it, we told her we were full. “That’s it?” she asked. “Nothing more?”
Before we could leave, however, she pulled out a bottle of brown liquor and poured us each a glass. It had a pleasant taste of overripe pears, and when I asked what it was, she said “carrubo,” then sent one of the children outside to retrieve a carob pod to illustrate. It was the first time I had come across carob outside a natural foods store. “Come back for dinner,” she said. “And make a reservation.”
The short drive from Frigintini to Modica takes you past empty fields turned brown by the sun; then the road dips into a valley covered in gnarled prickly pear cacti. Then you’re dodging pedestrians in a vibrant Baroque town known for its steep streets and savage sweet tooth. One of the trademarks here is the ’mpanatigghie, a ravioli-like cookie stuffed with chocolate, cinnamon, almond, and beef, all cooked down into a dense, rich filling. The town is also known for its cioccolata modicana, a distinctive style of chocolate made with cane sugar; every bite has a satisfying granular crunch. There are a dozen or so brands, each with their own shop (and sample bowls), and after trying them all we settled on the ones made by Casa Don Puglisi, and so stocked up on bars flavored with bergamot, coffee, and pistacchi di Bronte. The 127-year-old Antica Dolceria Bonajuto is famous for its chocolate, but it should be known for its cannoli di ricotta—they were the best either of us had ever tasted, and after finishing the last bite we walked along the Corso Umberto I in reverent silence.
Modica and ragusa are separated by a craggy ridge, and after some impressive switchbacks, you arrive at Ragusa Ibla, where the claustrophobic streets are lined with swirling Baroque buildings in various states of disrepair. It’s an unlikely location for Ristorante Duomo, the Michelin-starred place that is home to Ciccio Sultano, the island’s most celebrated chef. Sultano is a master of the new style of Sicilian cooking, and a meal at his restaurant is sophisticated and triumphant; it’s also expensive enough to make even a pair of New Yorkers blanch. But there’s nothing like his stuffed pork chop, itself a take on a standard Iblean dish: He stuffs a cut from a Nero dei Nebrodi with dried sausage and Ragusano cheese, then serves it with a chocolate sauce and a drizzle of mosto di Nero d’Avola, a grape-must vinegar with the depth and sweetness of the best balsamic.
Normally, an Italian hotel breakfast is something to skip, but the elegant Locanda Don Serafino serves a marmellata di zucca (pumpkin marmalade studded with pistachios) that is worth waking up for. That night, we had dinner at the hotel’s restaurant (located in an old stable nearby) and asked our waiter to recommend a wine to go with the lasagnette al cacao, made with cocoa pasta and clouds of fresh ricotta flavored with marjoram. “Nero d’Avola is this,” he said, holding his hand at eye level. “When it is from Eloro, it is like this,” he said, holding his hand high above his head and waving it around, then running off to bring us a bottle.
Which was what, we realized, eating in the Val di Noto is like. If swordfish is “this,” the swordfish here is “like this.” The pork is also “like this,” the culinary inventiveness “like this,” and the hospitality always “like this.”
Most people go to Catania to visit Mount Etna, not to eat, but we chose a morning in the pescheria over a day at the caldera. The fish market is the beating heart of the cuisine of the Val di Noto, and when it’s at its liveliest, before 8 a.m., the sunken square behind the Piazza del Duomo is a riot of barking fishmongers selling swordfish and tuna with the heads on so that you can tell how fresh they are. The market spills into neighboring streets, an aromatic mess where butchers trim down whole sides of beef, hunks of lardo are stacked high, quince and carob pastes sit pressed into molds, and stands overflow with bags of wild herbs.
Catania is intensely urban, and it feels much larger than a city of 300,000 residents. Like all Italian cities, it’s built with local stone. In this case, that means volcanic rock from Mount Etna, and the grand buildings on the Via Etnea are a rakish ash-gray-and-black trimmed with white. We looked in on all the famous pastry shops on the street before settling on Pasticceria Scardaci, which is tucked away on the first floor of a 300-year-old convent. Having just dodged foot traffic that made midtown Manhattan at lunch hour seem quaint, we treated ourselves to babbà so supple they were almost creamy, mini-cones filled with pistachio or hazelnut ice cream and dipped in chocolate, and a granita di caffè to brace us for the walk back to our hotel.
By our final morning, our solid suitcases were ready to burst. We had an unusually early flight, but we made time for a quick return visit to the pasticceria, and while I waited in the double-parked car with buses and Vespas swirling around me, Christine dashed in and returned with a trio of granitas—coffee, almond, and pistachio—all improbably wrapped in paper and tied with a bow. It was the start of a typical day in the Val di Noto: traffic-choked, surprising, and delicious.