2 Best Restaurants in Messina, Sicily

Light and elegance permeate this stone-walled restaurant, where the open kitchen provides theater and owner Peppe Giamboi takes the stage as a gustatory storyteller, roaming from table to table. The menu is constantly changing, but you'll find excellent work with vegetables (a rarity in Sicily) and really lovely preparations of local cod. In addition to a sublime rendition of stocco in ghiotto (cod in a Messinese sauce of tomatoes, olives, capers, and celery), it also might show up prepared under tender sheets of lardo (salt-cured pork fat) in a light orange-lemon sauce with fried leeks. 

You'll smell this panificio and focacceria before you arrive, as the scent of baking bread wafts down the street. The 45-year-old Francesco Arena works with ancient grains (like tumminia, perciasacchi, and rusello) and a hearty mother yeast to produce tender focaccia topped with everything from sun-sweetened tomatoes to escarole, crusty loaves, ham-and-cheese filled pidone, and the flakiest croissants. Arena has bread baking in his bones; his nonna opened the first family bakery in 1939, and his father followed suit with his own in 1970.