Ciccio Sultano is from the hill town of Ragusa-Ibla in southeastern Sicily. Just four years ago, with his partner, Angelo di Stefano, he opened restaurant Il Duomo.

Just two years later he was named best young cook in Italy by Gambero Rosso, Italy's leading food and wine publication. And in 2003, Il Duomo was awarded a Michelin star, one of only two restaurants so favored in Sicily.

The New York Times
By Nancy Harmon Jenkins
July 14, 2004

RAGUSA-IBLA, Sicily

CICCIO SULTANO was explaining the unconventional way he makes sorbetti at Il Duomo, his restaurant in the hill town of Ragusa-Ibla in southeastern Sicily. Delicate yet slightly granular, sorbetti are like a cross between granita and sorbet.

"With a barman," he said in Italian, and then in some exasperation, "un barman, un barman!" Grabbing my arm, he pulled me into his kitchen.

Turns out he meant one of those high-powered stick blenders that barmen use all over the world to produce frosty daiquiris and the like. And it turns out it is a super way to make sorbetto.

"Eighty percent fruit," he said proudly. Eighty percent or not, the result was incontestably fruity, with all the bright fragrance and flavor of the tobacco-box peaches, pesca tabacchiera, that he had used. The variety, grown on the volcanic slopes of nearby Mount Etna, looks like a gently squashed peach and resembles the snuffboxes that Sicilian gents carried when a pinch of snuff was a gentlemanly thing to take.

It has an extraordinary apple and berry flavor, like no other peach in the world. The flavor of the sorbetto was, to put it simply, stunning.

Seizing a bunch of spoons and the blender container, Mr. Sultano rushed into his small, elegant dining room and started spooning sorbetto into the mouths of startled customers.

"Assaggi, assaggi," he urged them. "Taste, taste!"

Such fervent enthusiasm, blended with natural talent and the considerable skill he acquired in restaurants in Germany and New York City as well as in Sicily, has propelled this 35-year-old into the frontline of Italian chefs. Just over four years ago, he and his partner, Angelo di Stefano, opened Il Duomo, a cool, tranquil retreat on a side street behind the voluptuous dome of San Giorgio, the cathedral (duomo in Italian) of Ragusa-Ibla.

Two years later, he was named best young cook in Italy by Gambero Rosso, Italy's leading food and wine publication. And in 2003, Il Duomo was awarded a Michelin star, one of only two restaurants so favored in Sicily.

Devotion to regional ingredients and traditions have always marked the best restaurants in Italy, no matter where they are. In seafood restaurants like Piccolo Napoli in Palermo, in osterias like Cantina Siciliana in Trapani or in bustling country trattorias like Ristorante Maiore in Chiaramonte Gulfi near Ragusa, there is a remarkable, almost unspoken consensus among diners and restaurateurs that honors strictly local ingredients and canonically traditional ways of putting them together.

But what distinguishes Mr. Sultano's kitchen is an extraordinarily playful attitude that underlies everything he does, even the most hoary traditions.

Time-honored Sicilian dishes are deconstructed and then reassembled with fresh dazzle in a menu that combines simplicity and sophistication with cool assurance. A good example is his house-made pasta with tenerumi, the green leaves of long cucuzza squash, a preparation straight from the thrifty peasant kitchen.

At Il Duomo, the dish comes garnished with tiny spicy pork meatballs, minced squid and a brilliant yellow egg-and-saffron sauce. The result is a presentation that is highly evolved in both texture and flavor, well balanced between spiced meat and sweet seafood, the whole napped in the earthy flavors of saffron and typical of the imaginative whimsy Mr. Sultano brings to his kitchen.

He talks about the game of the kitchen — the play of perfumes, flavors and colors — but in this game, innovation is the constant.

"I've been trying to make chocolate tagliatelle," he told me, "No, not as a dessert, as a first course. Chocolate tagliatelle with a bottarga sauce with toasted pine nuts. So far it's been a little unbalanced, but we're getting there."

Like many other European chefs, Mr. Sultano started young, at 13, in a bar and pastry shop in his hometown of Vittoria, which is nearby. There followed other Sicilian restaurants, then stints in classy places in Germany and New York, where he worked at Lidia Bastianich's restaurant Felidia.

But after months of New York City, he and his wife yearned for home in southeastern Sicily, a paradise of sun, a bountiful sea and an abundance of nature.

ONE very hot morning last summer, I set out with Mr. Sultano on a tour of some of his favorite spots in this dry land, which in latitude is even south of Tunis, as he reminded me, turning up the air-conditioning in his car.

At each stop, we lingered just long enough to savor the wares and toss around ideas for the day's menu. At the vegetable purveyors there were giant, white Giarratana onions, as well as big, green leaves of tenerumi and crisp fresh fennel. "Crema di finocchio — that's what I'll make," he said. "Fennel cream, and garnish a big gnocco with a big shrimp inside."

At a cheese dairy we tasted fresh sheep's-milk ricotta, still warm from the caldron, served in plastic soup bowls with bits of bread to dip in it. Then it was a rush to the fish market in Portopalo di Capo Passero as the first boats arrived back with the days catch — small Mediterranean red shrimp, often served raw, prized ricciola (amberjack) and tuna, and crates of silvery masculino, a fish in the anchovy family, which Mr. Sultano also serves raw atop a dollop of that same creamy ricotta mixed with bitter honey, miele amaro. It is a total fantasy: bitter-sweet honey and bland but rich ricotta, offset by the briny shock of raw fish.

Nearby in Marzamemi, we sampled the fabled Sicilian bottarga di tonno, salted and pressed tuna roe, which he uses liberally throughout his kitchen. A dish of house-made spaghetti served in a broth of sweet carrot juice and piled with grated bottarga is a recent addition to his menu.

All these small voices, as Mr. Sultano calls ingredients like these, add to the impact of his cuisine. Tomatoes grown in the sun-baked, mineral-dense soil of nearby Pachino are famous for lush flavor, juicy texture and a saltiness that is said to come from the nearness of the tomato beds to the sea. Reduced to a thick, bright purée, they sauce homemade pasta topped with strips of fried eggplant and shaved blades of ricotta salata in a classic dish from the region.

As we returned from our morning excursion, climbing back up past Ibla's rough-hewn walls, Mr. Sultano pointed to wild caper bushes clinging to the stones, then yellow fennel blossoms in the fields beyond the town. With a deep sigh of satisfaction, he inhaled the fennel fragrance.

"The longer I'm back here, the more I realize it's the right place for me to be," he said. "People ask me if I want to go back to New York and open a restaurant there. And I have to say, `No, I don't want to.' I love my work. I love my terrain here. I want to work with the ingredients I can get here."

"Last summer, we put up 100 liters of tomatoes, and Angelo's mamma makes all our sun-dried tomatoes herself," he said. "It's a fantastic thing to have that to cook with."

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