The Top 50 Places to Eat Near Modì

A terrace with a clear line to the Aeolian Islands is a reasonable excuse to linger over a Sicilian dinner, and the kitchen here gives you plenty of other reasons. This is a relaxed but serious restaurant in a small village outside Messina, with tasting menus that run a few courses and an à la carte side for those who prefer to choose. The wine list leans Sicilian and priced without greed, which is its own kind of hospitality.

1. 50 Top Italy #6 · The Best Restaurants Under €100
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The terrace here frames the Straits of Messina through a curtain of palms, and that view alone explains why tables are hard to come by. This is a two-Michelin-starred fine dining room inside a historic Taormina villa, where Heinz Beck partners with a resident chef whose Mediterranean roots pull the cooking somewhere warmer and more vivid than Beck's Roman work alone might suggest.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Stars
2. 50 Top Italy #16 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

Messina's arancini come with saffron in the rice here, which already sets them apart, and Rosticceria Famulari pushes further with thirty-odd variations, from pistachio to eggplant alla norma to mortadella with stringy cheese. This old-school street food counter in the city center also does pitone and mozzarella in carrozza, the full Messina rotisserie repertoire. It ranked fifth on the 50 Top Italy street food list, which the locals probably already knew.

1. 50 Top Italy #5 · The Best Street Food

A seafood restaurant on the waterfront at Villa San Giovanni, where the second-floor terrace looks straight across the Strait of Messina toward Sicily. The fish comes off the grill simply, or arrives raw in preparations that lean more creative, and the kitchen holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Most visitors here are catching a ferry; the ones who know are booking a table instead.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. 50 Top Italy #10 · The Best Cassate

Eight tables on a bougainvillea-draped terrace, with Etna, the Bay of Naxos, and Taormina's rooftops arranged below like they were put there for the occasion. This Michelin-starred fine dining room occupies a grand old villa, and the setting does a lot of the talking before the food arrives. The chef runs tasting menus of reinterpreted Sicilian cooking, with a vegetarian path available, and a wine list that runs deep into small local producers.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #27 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

A Michelin-starred restaurant on the Taormina coast where the tasting menus are organized around the four elements and certain dishes are named after films. The kitchen leans deep into Sicilian seafood, with raw Mazzara prawns showing up in pasta preparations alongside mozzarella foam and similarly theatrical touches. The room has a proper holiday-on-the-water feel, elegant service, and a wine list that runs well beyond the island.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A terrace overlooking Taormina's rooftops that stops you mid-sentence is how dinner at this Michelin-starred fine dining room tends to begin. The chef has been here longer than the San Domenico Palace's sweeping renovation, and the cooking reflects it: a tour of Sicily that moves from coastal seafood to mountain produce to the volcanic slopes of Etna, with vegetables and fruit carrying more weight than you might expect.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #44 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Neapolitan pizza spot in Messina with a longer reach than most: in summer the whole operation shifts to Blanco Beach Club on the Strait, where you eat with water views instead of walls. High-hydration doughs and long leavening are the kitchen's religion, with a pronounced crust alongside Roman-style and fried options. A second location near the Duomo adds a proper sit-down dining angle for those who want more than a slice.

1. 50 Top Pizza #41 · 50 Top Pizza Italy

A one-star Michelin restaurant in Taormina's historic centre that started life as a wine bar and never quite shook the identity, which is a good thing. The list is long and lovingly kept, and the staff will talk about it all night if you let them. The kitchen turns out creative, Sicilian-rooted tasting menus and à la carte in a polished dining room, with outdoor tables on a quiet pedestrian lane when the weather cooperates.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

Half deli, half bistro, with the kitchen deciding which half you're in based on the hour. At lunch it's a casual counter among local salumi and cheeses; come evening, the shop quiets down and wooden tables and soft lighting take over for proper Calabrian cooking with a contemporary edge. The fish is aged on site, and the menu moves between local catch and the occasional Wagyu cut, which feels like a reasonable range of ambition for one room.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Steps from the Lungomare in Bagnara Calabra, this intimate trattoria has been around forever and holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand for cooking that threads Calabrian and Greek flavors together without making a fuss about it. The chef's roots do the talking: squid stuffed with feta, swordfish prepared with care. Small room, warm room, the kind of place where you feel less like a customer than a guest someone actually wanted to show up.

1. 50 Top Italy #34 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Modern Trattorias And Bistros
2. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Perched on Vulcano island with the Aeolian archipelago spread out below, this two-Michelin-starred restaurant asks you to arrive before sunset, which is either romantic advice or a scheduling requirement. Chef Davide Guidara runs a single surprise tasting menu built around plant-based cooking, fermentation, and garden produce, with kombucha pairings as the default and a full wine cellar for anyone who needs convincing.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Stars
2. 50 Top Italy #20 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

The dessert course ends at a dedicated patisserie counter where the kitchen makes your final sweet to order, shaped around what you actually want, which is a pretty good way to close a Michelin-starred tasting menu dinner. The contemporary Mediterranean cooking leans on local Aeolian produce, with French-leaning sauces and fermentation adding quiet depth. The terrace sits above the sea on Vulcanello, with the rest of the archipelago spread out below the sunset.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #20 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

A gazebo dining room where the waves breaking on the beach are close enough to count, with a sheltered indoor room waiting if the weather turns. This is a modern Sicilian restaurant where the chef runs tasting menus, vegetarian options included, alongside an à la carte list that pulls from both land and sea. The cooking leans local and contemporary, plated with the kind of color and care that makes you slow down.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name is Sicilian dialect for "shop," and the place did start as a grocery before becoming a trattoria and wine bar with paper tablecloths that no one seems to mind. The kitchen leans on whatever the market and the sea are offering that day, and the wine list runs Sicilian and beyond. Tiny room, unpredictable hours by season, and parking in central Giardini Naxos is its own small adventure, so call ahead.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The black pigs here roam free in the Nebrodi Mountains, and eventually they end up on the table, which is the whole point. Fattoria Borrello is a family-run farm trattoria where one generation raises the animals and tends the garden while another cooks and pours. The menu shifts with the seasons and leans hard on house-cured meats and cheeses, with pasta rounding things out. Deeply unhurried, deeply Sicilian.

1. 50 Top Italy #42 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Modern Trattorias And Bistros

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

The drive up the slopes of Mt Etna to reach this creative fine dining restaurant inside the Villa Neri is half the experience. The chef builds tasting menus around Sicilian ingredients, sometimes reaching for complexity but never losing the thread of the island. The wine list leans hard into Etna labels, including the property's own, which pairs neatly with the olive oil they also press themselves.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A family-run seafood restaurant in the historic center of Palmi where the catch of the day arrives as carpaccio dressed with house-made vinaigrette, and desserts are announced aloud at the table rather than printed on a card. The menu leans Mediterranean and fish-forward, though a small meat contingent gets its own section for anyone who wandered in by accident. The cannolo apparently shows up regardless.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A pizzeria near the A18 highway exit that takes the format seriously enough to offer both Sicilian and Neapolitan styles under one roof, low-and-crispy alongside high-and-pillowy, without making a fuss about it. The menu organizes around the margherita and builds outward in honest increments. Croquettes are the move to start. The wine list leans local but ranges wider, and the staff actually know what's on it.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza Italy Excellent Pizzerias

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

The drive through Aspromonte's olive groves and wild hillsides is, itself, part of the meal. Qafiz is a Michelin-starred omakase restaurant where a handful of seats wrap around an open kitchen in a farmhouse deep in Calabria, and the chef builds a tasting menu that reads like a portrait of the region. Remote enough that guests often just stay the night, which the property accommodates.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #27 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Grand Restaurants

You walk through an orchard of citrus trees to reach a 19th-century palmento, a stone building once used for fermenting wine, that now holds one of Sicily's more quietly stunning dining rooms. The chef earns a Michelin star with tasting menus that put the island's ingredients through a modern, confident reinterpretation. À la carte is available too, for anyone allergic to commitment.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #42 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

1. 50 Top Italy #8 · The Best Cannoli

A former barrel warehouse tucked into the narrow alleys of Riposto's centre, this contemporary Sicilian restaurant is run by a self-taught chef whose menu splits evenly between meat and fish, which is a quiet statement given the port is practically next door. Two tasting menus and a full à la carte, house olive oil from the family farm, and a dish named for the chef's father's favourite recipe round out a room that takes its food seriously without making you feel it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A Neapolitan pizza spot in Gioia Tauro with a pool, which sets the mood before you've even ordered. The dough is contemporary in technique but classic in flavor, and local Calabrian ingredients show up in ways that feel earned rather than gimmicky. The drinks list, cocktails, gin, and wines, gets real attention. Young crowds fill the room on warm nights, and the energy stays loose without tipping into chaos.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza Italy Excellent Pizzerias

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The chef grew up here, left, and came back, which tells you something. Signum is a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Aeolian island of Salina, where the kitchen leans hard into the local, including the salt-forward intensity that lesser cooks would try to soften. Tasting menus run six to nine courses, the wine list pulls from some of the family's own production, and the setting, styled like a traditional Aeolian village, makes it easy to stay longer than planned.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #23 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Pizza spot in Rizziconi where the dough is soft and the fried starters, including cacio e pepe supplì and pasta frittata, arrive before you've had time to settle in. The menu leans into Calabrian identity, with a pizza built around struncatura, the region's once-humble pasta, making a quiet case for local ingredients. Service is meticulous and the room is contemporary without trying too hard. Ranked on 50 Top Pizza Italy.

1. 50 Top Pizza #69 · 50 Top Pizza Italy

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

One dining room looks straight onto the bell tower of the Basilica Collegiata; the other turns inward and quieter. Alloro is a small, modern Sicilian restaurant in Acireale's baroque center, where the kitchen takes traditional island cooking somewhere more assertive and personal. Tasting menus or à la carte, the meal ends with a dessert riff on tiramisù they've renamed with a pun that works better in Italian but lands either way.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A sixteenth-century wine press anchors the dining room of this contemporary Sicilian restaurant, set inside a relais at the foot of Mount Etna. The courtyard the building opens into makes the plain exterior feel like a small joke at the diner's expense. The kitchen leans on local vegetables and island ingredients, reworking traditional Sicilian flavors with a modern hand.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A wood-fired oven and a firm no to anything fancy: this Calabrian pizzeria plants its flag in classic Neapolitan tradition and doesn't waver. The dough is carefully made, the fried montanare and calzones hold their own alongside the pizzas, and the panuozzi are worth the carb reckoning. Prices stay reasonable enough that regulars actually come back without a special occasion as cover. Neapolitan desserts round things out.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza Italy Excellent Pizzerias

A former monastery just outside Tropea, now home to a tasting-menu restaurant where the citrus fruit on your plate may have been growing in the garden an hour before. The kitchen works through contemporary Calabrian cooking across multi-course menus, leaning on vegetables and produce from the property. The wine list keeps it regional, and there's a bar if you'd rather start with a cocktail than a pairing.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A pizza dedicated to the Calabrian onion sounds like a narrow brief, but it tells you everything about how this pizzeria in central Tropea operates. Contemporary Neapolitan-style pies anchor the menu, with local appetizers and pitte rounding out a spread that leans hard into regional ingredients. The room has the feel of somewhere the owner genuinely cares about, which in Tropea is either a given or a small miracle, depending on your luck.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza Italy Excellent Pizzerias

Cortile Siciliano is a pizzeria tucked down a small side street in Tremestieri Etneo, where the local style means a low, crackery crust rather than the pillowy domes you'd get elsewhere. Three doughs, classic, rustic, and charcoal, each pair with particular pies, though the kitchen will mix and match on request. The wine list reaches from Sicily to France and pours by the glass via Coravin, which is a little more serious than a pizzeria usually bothers to be.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza Italy Excellent Pizzerias