The restaurant
There was a need that Palermo didn’t think it had: the need for fine dining. For almost half a century in the capital, unlike other Sicilian areas suited to tourism, there was a lack of high-end catering, which suddenly exploded, taking on two very different faces almost simultaneously: the MEC of Carmelo Trentacosti and the Gagini of Mauricio Zillo, starred respectively in 2022 and 2021, both populated by a dense clientele of natives.
The location of the first raises outsized expectations. You enter from the door of Palazzo Castrone Santa Ninfa, in the central Corso Vittorio Emanuele: a sixteenth-century marvel, whose internal courtyard is dominated by a monumental, although slender and towering, centuries-old palm tree. Here on the first floor the architect and patron Giuseppe Forello has strategically arranged, in the marble rooms with frescoed ceilings, his Apple memorabilia, which make up a museum of the history of computing, which can be visited in the morning. It opened at the same time the MEC restaurant, immersed in an enigmatic beauty, animated by contrast.
He officiates there Carmelo Trentacosti, old acquaintance of the Palermo people. Born in Germany to an emigrant couple and returning to the island as a child, at the age of 12 he was already cooking with his grandmother and uncle, cook at the Enel canteen. Hence the decision to enroll at the Paolo Borsellino Alberghiero, a springboard for prestigious experiences, including the Excelsior in Venice, the Grand Hotel in Cortina and the Mulinazzo by Nino Graziano, of which he was right-hand man (but today he teaches himself). Having entered the Italian National Chefs team, he participates in international competitions, including as a pastry chef; then he returns to Sicily with his wife and from 2012 to 2019 he stays at Villa Igiea.
The meeting with Giuseppe Forello is karmic: a chat is enough to find an agreement. In the frescoed rooms Trentacosti instantly imagines a white tablecloth and a black armchair, as an expression of his cuisine. It will be called MEC, an acronym for Meet Eat Connect, because it connects distant worlds. And while the installation progresses, he studies Gastronomy, Hospitality and Territory, a faculty where he will graduate in April with a thesis on Bourbon cuisine.
From five-star luxury to a 24-seat fine dining restaurant, it’s not a short leap. “Managing a hotel with 120 rooms, which organizes 120 weddings a year and contains 4 restaurants, strengthens your shoulders; but already inside Villa Igiea my dream of a gourmet restaurant had come true in Cuvée du Jour, which came close to reaching the star in 2018″. Its second incarnation is here, from scratch and without compromise: everything related to catering was chosen or designed personally by Trentacosti. When it opened in 2020, ten collaborators followed him from Villa Igiea, including the second Antonio Lo Cicero; while the pastry shop, previously managed personally, is now entrusted to the pastry chef Gianluca Bruno. In the room Alessandro Comella, arriving from Cracco, he is maître and sommelier, responsible for a cellar that has expanded to 750 labels, including a lot of Sicily and a lot of France, but also the New World.
The dishes
In the bread basket the sourdough loaf, the marinated onion breadsticks, soon the sfincione croissant with oil or anchovy butter, molded into a small apple. You can eat à la carte, with five dishes per batch, or choose between two tasting menus: Contaminazioni (140 euros) and Vegetable Frontiers (125 euros), in the certainty that the material will still be extraordinary. “Seven years ago, with a Roman consultant, Manuela Mancino, I toured Sicily by car looking for niche products.
We found many: goat’s robiola from Joppolo Giancaxio, hairy watermelon from Partanna, Vastedda del Belice from Calogero Cangemi, citrus fruits and Sicilian breed chicken eggs (the horned one of Caltanissetta, almost extinct, fed on Sicilian wheat) from Marineo, my town. Then there are the meshed fennel, which grows wild on the hills, and local vegetables, often from niche farmers.” The connection to the IT universe takes on symbolic forms, obtained from silicone molds. This is the case of preserved Caponata, profiled like the classic bitten apple.
“When a child leaves, in Sicily the mother packs the preserves for him. Caponata and sauce can never be missing. Hence the idea of a seasonally adjusted product, preserved in a protected atmosphere, which is spread on the plate and sprinkled with Modica chocolate, in the Arab way. It is eaten by making a slipper with a brioche with olives and double concentrate, which finishes reconstructing the dish”. Still: “The fennel In my opinion, it is a vegetable that is undervalued and that we eat practically only raw. But I like to extract the most from the product, so I get different consistencies, of cream, flan and air, with edges for the vegetable, the right acid contrast and popcorn”. THE Fusilloni with broccoli they revisit the classic recipe, but without raisins or pine nuts.
They are cooked entirely in the pan, starting raw, and portioned in the room, with a grating of truffle and a veil of mornay sauce to refine them. A unique baked pasta, which required a long technical study. The artichoke was born from the vision of the chef’s son, Filippo, while he greedily browsed the flower heads roasted on his grill. Then a treasure chest of smoky petals, around the artichoke cream, the egg yolk and the truffle, on top of a cheese fondue, in the mix between popular grit and the patterns of great cuisine.
The advice is to stop at the table the cheese trolley, containing 20 all Sicilian varieties, served with dried and fresh fruit, mustard, honey and 3 types of bread (brioche with raisins, olive bread, carob bread). “Almost a signature” the cassata, composed of ricotta and pistachio mousse (which in summer will become ice cream), cocoa dacquoise and orange gelée, without sugar overloads.
Contacts
MEC Restaurant
Via Vittorio Emanuele, 452, 90134 Palermo PA
Telephone: 347 753 2005
mecrestaurant.it
