The Top 52 Places to Eat Near Vico Astemio

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

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

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 Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

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

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

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 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

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

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.

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A restored warehouse in Catania, its walls rotating art from Sicilian and international artists, frames a fine dining room that earns a Michelin star through the chef's obsessive focus on local ingredients, including olive oil and produce from his own garden. The wine cellar seats guests among bottles sourced entirely from across the island. Parking nearby is its own adventure, but the room, the food, and a sommelier who actually knows when to stop talking make it survivable.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

Paintings of Etna in all its moods line the walls, the work of a Sicilian artist who made the volcano his life's subject. This one-Michelin-star contemporary Italian restaurant settled into central Catania after years elsewhere on the island, and the cooking follows the same unhurried logic: Sicilian ingredients and technique, nothing pushed harder than it needs to be. The sommelier can walk you through the wine list and end the night with a pour of aged Marsala.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

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.

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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

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 Bib Gourmand

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 Bib Gourmand

1. 50 Top Italy #9 · The Best Cassate

A tiny vegetable bistro tucked into the old center of Catania, where you pick your meal at the counter by choosing how many courses you want rather than what you want, since the menu changes with whatever came in that morning. Tables spill onto the street, the kitchen is open, and the whole thing runs on seasonal produce leaning vegan, with a short list of local natural wines to round it out.

1. 50 Top Italy #9 · The Best Vegetable Bistros

Meat hooks still hang from the ceiling of what used to be a butcher's shop in Catania's old fish market, which tells you everything about the spirit of this street food counter. Scirocco was among the first to build a menu entirely around fresh fish delivered daily from the docks, rice balls stuffed with cuttlefish or swordfish, fried fish in a takeaway carton, and sandwiches that lean hard into Sicilian tradition. Ranked fourth on 50 Top Italy's street food list.

1. 50 Top Italy #4 · The Best Street Food

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Beautiful ceilings in a historic Catanian building set the room before a single plate arrives. This is a creative Sicilian restaurant where the chef reworks the city's own specialities through personal memory rather than textbook tradition, naming dishes after mornings and animals in ways that make more sense once you taste them. The tasting menu leans on contrast and surprise, which is either what you're in the mood for or it isn't.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The door looks like it belongs to someone's apartment, and inside, a wall stacked floor to ceiling with jars of seeds, lentils, and nuts makes the point before a dish arrives. This is a casual modern Sicilian restaurant where shared tables and a short menu rooted in land and sea keep things grounded. The kitchen leans on the grill and follows the seasons closely, with vegetables given the same attention as the fish.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Two 1930 frescoes by Giuseppe Barone hang in the dining room of this intimate restaurant near the Teatro Bellini, where a trio of young Catanian chefs have taken over a space that used to be a haunt of the city's high society. The focus is contemporary Sicilian cooking, but meat, especially off the grill, is the real reason to sit downstairs. A cocktail bar run by one of the partners occupies the floor above.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

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.

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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

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

A pizzeria in Lentini's city center where the dough gets more thought than most places give their entire menu, with three distinct options including a contemporary version built on biga and poolish that comes out smooth and airy. Montanarine, fried pasta, pizzoli, and several takes on the margherita round things out. The room is modern and unhurried, the service young and easy. A solid stop between Siracusa and Catania.

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1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

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. 50 Top Italy #10 · The Best Cassate

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

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 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

Aged cuts are displayed like exhibits before they ever see the grill, which tells you what Al Pilèr thinks the main event is. It's a meat-forward Sicilian restaurant in the hill-town centre of Nicosia, where the menu rounds out the charred headliners with generous, colour-forward classic dishes that lean slightly creative. The name comes from an old boundary stone that once split the Arab and Norman quarters of town, still partly visible nearby.

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A meat-focused osteria a short walk from the island of Ortigia, where the kitchen ages cuts on the premises and fires them in a Josper oven. The sourcing leans toward non-intensive farms, which the menu is happy to tell you about. Sicilian wines anchor a list that wanders usefully beyond the island. Soft lighting and genuinely warm service make the whole thing feel less like a steakhouse and more like someone's very well-stocked dining room.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Tufa stone walls from the fifteenth century form the dining room at this Sicilian restaurant tucked into Ortigia, a short walk from the cathedral. The kitchen takes traditional island cooking and tilts it somewhere personal, the kind of place that's been around forever without feeling like a museum. Candlelight, period wood, wrought iron, and a menu that apparently ends better than it begins, if the inspector's nudge about dessert is any guide.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A terrace over Porto Lachio, with Ortigia sitting just across the water, sets the stage at this relaxed Mediterranean spot on the Syracuse waterfront. The menu is built for sharing, moving between tapas, fried bites, tartare, burgers, and pizza with a distinctly southern Italian coastal lean. Come with people you like enough to argue over the last piece. It holds a listing in 50 Top Pizza Italy's Excellent Pizzerias.

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Vaulted ceilings in an old Siracusa building frame a pizza shop that takes seasonality as seriously as any fine-dining kitchen nearby. The chef is half Alto Adige, half Sicilian, and the menu reads like both halves are arguing productively. Four dough styles on offer, from pan to a paper-thin version that somehow feels lighter the more you eat. Local beers, a lively wine list, and service that actually moves.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza Italy Excellent Pizzerias