48 Hours in Palermo
Surviving toddler jet-lag and carbo-loading as a form of cultural assimilation.
Ciao! From Siracusa, Sicily, where the air is bone dry, the fennel runs wild, and anchovies wiggle their way into every meal. I’m sharing my intel on Palermo, with more Sicily content to follow. But first, what to eat/drink/wear/listen, wherever you are.
** These are the things I genuinely love. Nobody is paying me in exchange for these recommendations. I got some discounts for you just for fun.
EAT
Of all the fishy things we ate in Palermo, I’d say the standout was the simplest (go figure) -- spaghetti burro e alici (butter and anchovies). The spaghetti was notably al dente, the sauce a blanket of salty goodness. The trick to achieving the signature silkiness using nothing but anchovies and high quality butter, is to cook the spaghetti in less water than usual. The resultant pasta water is high in residual starch that works magic at emulsifying melted anchovies and butter into one harmonious sauce.
COOK
My friends Heather Sperling and Emily Feiffer, of Botanica Restaurant, make The Magic Spice, a collaboration with CAP Beauty. It’s catnip for children; my kids will fight to the death over anything it adorns, be it a piece of raw fennel or warm popcorn. Made with dried Persian lime (a personal fav), coriander seed, garlic chives, green garlic, and CAP Beauty Himalayan salt, it’s savory and versatile. And, I am offering 20% off on Magic Spice for paid subscribers down below.
DRINK
My favorite mocktail is muddled umeboshi plum with a dash of umeboshi vinegar, topped off with soda water and finished with a squeeze of citrus. Japanese people put a lot of faith in the wrinkled, salted, flavor bombs, turning to them to cure hangovers, lower blood pressure, and to boost calcium absorption. For me, they just hit the right note of salty, sweet and sour all at once.
WEAR
For the fellow plant lover out there, Anntian is a German brand that I have been following for some time. They work with natural dyes and have a playful way of incorporating photographic landscapes into their prints. You can find them online at Beklina (I also love their shoes—very stylish and comfy). They consistently stock the line at Henrik Vibskov in SoHo, NYC. Lucky for you, Beklina is offering 20% off to my paid subscribers (code behind paywall down below).
LISTEN
I am a sucker for anything that pays homage to, “women of a certain age,” so Julia Louis Dreyfus’s podcast, Wiser Than Me feels tailor-made. This week, I listened to the episode with legendary artist, poet, musician, and mother, Patti Smith. She touches on her practice then and now, her personal style, her career, and most poignantly, her role as a mother.
To this day people will say to me, ‘Well, in the '80s, you didn't do anything.’ In the '80s, I had two children. Two children! I washed a million diapers. I planted trees. I wrote every day. I evolved as a human being. It was only a certain amount of time, but I spent that time with the love of my life. How can you say that I did nothing in the '80s? Because of how the media [affects] people's headspace, people think if you're an artist but weren’t in the public eye, then you didn’t exist. I have pride in what I accomplished in those years.
-- Patti Smith on Wiser than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Landing in Palermo
Jet lag is a bitch for grown adults, but it turns toddlers into menopausal women going through chemical withdrawal. This summer, our ultimate destination was Anna Tasca Lanza culinary school in the center of Sicily, where I would be teaching a vegetable cooking course (more on that in the next newsletter). Knowing I would have to jump to hosting and cooking mode the moment we arrived at the retreat, we were wise enough to hunker down in Palermo first, where the promise of anonymity would lessen the impact of the emotional roller coaster that was bound to ensue. And hopefully, we would get a dose of Sicilian city life before we moved on to vineyards, sleepy towns, and beaches.
This is my first time to Sicily’s capital, Palermo. There is a scrappiness to this city that you won’t find in Northern Italy, where cultural institutions are subsidized and the architecture meticulously restored. In Palermo, the walls are crumbling. In the comparatively poor South of the country, museums are self-funded and pieced together in a way that I found charmingly personal. It’s hard to find an elderly man in possession of all his teeth, which may or may not freak out your kids when confronted, nose-to-nose by unsolicited cheek pinching (the stereotype of the Southern Sicilian love of children is 100% true).
Between naps and tantrums, we still managed to really explore the city, from small museums and flea markets, to some great restaurants and gelato shops. We stumbled upon an olive oil and coffee tasting festival in a rambling botanic garden in the middle of the city, and walked along the boardwalk of the marina, snacking on lupini beans and watching grandpas teach their grandkids to fish. The city comes alive at night. Tiny wine and cocktail bars bubble out into the cobblestone streets where people flaunt their regional superpower: consuming an infinite feast of carbs and mixed drinks. My list includes a handful of bars that looked really good from the outside peering in!
I’m including my complete Google map for Palermo for paid subscribers. More on Sicily to come, including lots of delicious recipes.
Palermo Highlights
Rooms At the Majolica Museum
My favorite class of museums have no sign out front and a provenance that traces back to one individual’s runaway obsession. The Rooms At The Majolica Museum tick all those boxes, on the second floor of a dilapidated, residential building, with just two open hours a day (check the schedule before you go). The owner of the collection still lives in the apartment, with its walls covered floor to ceiling in singular examples of Majolica tile (the glossy, thick, handmade painted tile you find all over this part of Italy). In the wake of World War II, he would walk through the rubble of palaces and churches, gleaning the ornately painted remnants of floors and kitchen backsplashes. From there, a collection was born.
The influence of North Africans and the Moorish people are ever present in the motifs, some of them could be mistaken for Moroccan cement tile if it wasn’t for the dappled, shiny, signature Majolica surface. Alongside tile, you can see incredible examples of vintage product design in the form of a collection of biscuit tins and candy jars. The kitchen walls are covered with ceramic jelly molds.
Museo Internazionale delle Marionette Antonio Pasqualino
Since joining the board of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles, I consider myself a card-carrying puppet freak. We discovered this three story museum just by walking past, and oh what kismet that was. Apparently, Sicily has been the epicenter of marionette theater since the early 1800s, and was declared a UNESCO masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage. The museum has armies of Italian puppets, but also exhibits from Mali, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. They have weekly performances in the sun drenched theater space. We weren’t lucky enough to catch a show, but they happen weekly.
Osteria Lo Bianco Sede Storica
Our favorite restaurant experience was at this casual trattoria, with red and white checkered tablecloths and real, live, fat Italian, mustachioed chefs slinging spaghetti and serenading one another in the steamy galley kitchen. The menu is seafood-forward and homey, with simple Sicilian dishes like caponata and linguine with shellfish. The salt cod was baked in tomato sauce and breadcrumbs until it formed a concentrated crust. New to me was pasta with sardines and tons of cooked-down, wild fennel, something I am now working into my repertoire.
Moltivolti
Moltivolti sits tucked away, punctuating the long, winding Ballarò street market, a North African bazaar with fried food, gorgeous produce, olive carts, and giant tuna for sale. (Ballarò market is a must see too, especially if you want to eat octopus salad before 8am, like my kids). A mix of Sicilian, Middle Eastern, and African cuisine, this was a welcome break from pasta dinner for me (and great for kids). We had a vegetarian Maffe, a Senegalese peanut stew, and a couscous with seafood with notes of saffron, alongside some Sicilian classics, like a fennel/olive/citrus salad.
Buatta Cucina Popolana
The source for that spaghetti burro e alici mentioned above, this sweet trattoria sits alongside a touristy main drag, but offers a legit Sicilian lunch in a classy room. We died over the pasta alla Norma, and even enjoyed their simple green salad, a rarity in this part of the world.
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