When planning our trip to Sicily, the first thing I decided was that I wanted to return to La Madia after the wonderful dinner we enjoyed there in 2013. Chef Pino Cuttaia still holds two Michelin stars. The restaurant looked completely different, both inside and outside.

The waiter told us we had actually skipped a remodelling of the restaurant. Next to à la carte there are three tasting menus to choose from: I’Ilusione (7 courses for 150 euros), Il mare inaspettato (8 courses for 170 euros), and Scala dei Turchi (9 courses for 190 euros). We opted for the latter, with wine pairing (6 wines for 100 euros).

We started with a sparkling wine made from Chardonnay and Inzolia grown close to the restaurant in Campobello with second fermentation in the bottle and aged for 70 months, brut nature. The wine is not degorged. Very nice and elegant.

The first antipasto, Pizzaiola, is an evolved version of the same dish as 11 years ago, which looks and tastes like a pizza, but is not. The crust is hollow and only a ring. Inside of it is potato foam instead of mozzarella, with smoked hake (fish), tomato powder, and fresh oregano. Wonderful and delicious.

The wine for the next two antipasti is Cusumano Shamaris 2022, 100% Grillo from Tenuta Monte Pietroso in Sicily. A light and elegant wine.

It was not an ideal pairing for the next antipasto, which had also stayed on the menu by popular request. It was a fake buffalo mozzarella, made of a milk skin (the skin that forms on top of milk when you boil it), filled with a mousse of buffalo mozzerella and served with a tomato coulis and extra virgin olive oil. The ‘mozzarella’ is amazingly light and fluffy. The wine was fine with the mozzarella, but struggling a bit with the sweetness of the tomato.

The wine did work well with the fetta (slice) of white tuna, served with lemon and olive oil, served lukewarm.

The dish came with a card with a photo in black and white, telling about childhood memories of mothers preparing such a dish for their children when they were not feeling well. The lemon seed on top of the tuna symbolizes those memories, because the seeds fall out of the lemon when you squeeze it, and mothers generally just serve it like that.

The next wine was a 2021 Sciare Vive Carricante, a very earthy wine.

It was an excellent pairing for the “Painting of Anchovies”. Anchovies ‘carpaccio’ with tomato, olive oil, and a ‘frame’ of bottarga. Again wonderful and delicious.

The same wine was also a great pairing for the Scale di Turchi.

This dish was created to look like, and taste like, the nearby landmark Scale di Turchi that we had actually visited that same afternoon. You can see on the photo that the dish actually resembles the shape of the white rocks.

Underneath was something that looked like, and tasted like (in a good way), sea water with sand, and delicate tender ‘rocks’ of sea urchin (uni) with squid (calamari). When I first saw the dish I thought there were going to be strips of squid underneath the foam, but it was actually just foam (and I do not have a clue how they made it look that way in the kitchen).

The next wine was a blend of 85% Grillo 85% with 15% Zibibbo (Muscat d’Alexandrie) from Trapani on Sicily, nicely aromatic.

It was a very good pairing for another amazing dish: crème brûlée of octopus. The octopus was separated into skin and flesh, with the octopus skin turned into the ‘skin’ of the crème brûlée, and the flesh was used in the ‘pudding’ with cream of cauliflower. The flesh was very tender and the combination of octopus with the mild cauliflower worked very well. The octopus flesh was very tender with a pleasant bite.

The following wine that the sommelier proposed was a natural wine with skin contact (halfway to an orange wine). He allowed us to taste every wine first, and as I did not like it, he came up with the 2020 Castellucci Miano Shiarà as an alternative. This was a Cataratto from Valledolmo DOC on Sicily. The bottle looked like a German Riesling bottle, and the wine also reminded me a bit of a German Riesling. Obviously not as acidic, but very elegant.

It was a good pairing for the primo piatto, called Giostra mediterranea (Mediterranean carrousel). There was a large single sheet of pasta in there, raw red shrimp, ‘crackers’ of fish stock, and other flavors. As intended, it was really a carrousel of flavors and hard to make out exactly what was in there. But it was delicious.

The secondo piatto was barbecued grouper…

…served with mashed potatoes. Tweezers were provided so you could move the fish to the dish yourself, as a change from the waiter doing this as is usual in Michelin starred restaurants. This was easily the least interesting dish of the meal. The mashed potatoes were delicious, but just mashed potatoes, and the grouper was very firm.

As a dessert wine we had the 2016 Pioggia di Stelle by Cantina Marilina, a passito of Nero d’Avola. Lightly sweet with notes of cherry.

I picked the “baba au rhum” from the four desserts to choose from. The baba was stuffed with a vanilla cream and topped with raspberries and pistachios. The dessert was very nice, but a bit too sweet for the wine.

When we mentioned this, for the next dessert we changed to a Hauner Malvasia delle Lipari, that was very nice and indeed slightly sweeter.

This was quite nice with the baba with gelato, for which you could choose from four flavors.

Coffee was served with very nice sweetened almonds.

It is always a risk to return to a restaurant with high expectations. But in this case the high expectations were met. The food was as good as I remembered it, and it was a great improvement that now a wine pairing was available.

The chef has written in the menu that his “secret ingredient” is memories. Every dish contains a memory, tries to tell a story, and employs childhood games. What I think is so great about his dishes is that he does not only manage to tell the story and that the dishes look wonderful, but that they are also delicious. All too often I have been to restaurants where the dishes look excellent for Instagram and there is a long story told by the waiters with a lot of complicated technique involved to create the dish, but then the taste is just OK. Chef Pino Cuttaia manages to combine everything, making this one of the best restaurants I have ever been to. And making it a mystery why this restaurant is not fully booked with three Michelin stars instead of two. But perhaps that is not a mystery but just because Licata in Sicily is far away and not at all part of a fine dining scene.

Apart from the food, the service and wine were also excellent. I loved that all wines were from Sicily. They were good pairings and changes were made to meet our preferences.

I’ll have to make sure and plan a trip to Sicily sooner than after another 11 years…