Here is everything we ate in Palermo.
Chickpea fritters, red prawn tartare pasta with a rooftop view, and a frankly incredible spleen sandwich.
The bulk of my May was spent in Sicily. We flew into Palermo on a Saturday lunchtime, and proceeded to spend a few days in the city before hitting the road first for Trapani (of Pesto alla Trapanese fame), then Agrigento (Valley of the Temples), Ragusa (UNESCO town of new Sicilian baroque) before ending up in Syracusa (or more specifically the island of Ortigia). I plan to write at length both here and on the travel section of my website about how wonderfully varied Sicily is as you travel it’s South coast, but today let’s start in one of the street food capitals of Europe.
Palermo was all about the street food, things with drinks, and whilst we had two proper restaurant meals, I’d propose you explore the city with an open mind and an open stomach trying whatever looks or sounds good at the time around visits to some of the incredibly stunning churches that are dotted around the city (more about those are coming in my city guide on my blog which I’ll try and link back to here, but not to be missed are the Palazzo dei Normanni’s Palatine Chapel, and the Chiesa e Monastero di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria!)
Snacks & Street Food
What I loved about Sicily, but about Palermo specifically is how opportunities to eat are designed as such to draw out the eating for as long as possible. I also loved how there were endless different meals of the day available, and how it was up to you to eat however many and whichever you chose.
One of my favourite bites in Sicily - and the best thing I ate in Palermo - is often eaten as a breakfast food, but can be enjoyed at any time of the day: the spleen sandwich.
Antica Focacceria S Francesco has been selling Sicilian street food since 1834, and according to our guide Ambra (email her to enquire about a tour if you’re visiting Palermo because she was fantastic, and got us into the shop before opening to beat the queues! - big thanks to Original Travel for hooking us up with her!) explained to us that their example of the classic Palermo spleen sandwich is one of the flavours Sicilians who have been away from home for a while crave on their return, even though it is so rich (I only had a mini one - big regrets for that!) it is only a once in a while treat.
To make it, cow spleen, lung, and trachea are boiled, then compressed and sliced before being fried in pork fat and loaded into a bun either by itself with a spritz of lemon (what I opted for) or with a handful of grated cheese and / or a slick of ricotta. I’d describe the taste as that of liver, but slightly earthier and more complex, and with a bit more chew. Writing this before breakfast I’d happily dig into one right now, even though I’m still trying to wash the pork grease out of the top I was wearing that morning…!
Fellow Substacker Ruth Stroud who tried one on a Palermo street food walking tour has written about the dish’s supposed Jewish origins, surprising for something quite literally fried in pork fat, but I actually think this is seriously Jewish food if you ignore the fact it’s not kosher: it makes use of what others discard and turns them into something that is pure delicious indulgence.
Salamino Pane & Vino, found at the bottom of Mercato Ballaro (more on that below) was recommended to us by Ambra just before she left us correctly reading the room that I was the only one of our group who would have been happy diving back into the bustle of the market for something to eat (!) A wine bar that also has a big menu of sandwiches and typical apero snacks (literally things to go with drinks) we had some great local white and shared the bruschetta, and a pinsa, a Roman flatbread with an airier crust than pizza, usually smaller and loaded up with typical toppings.
In Sicily, if you order the bruschetta don’t expect it to be all tomato, indeed don’t be surprised if you’re served one without any at all; instead you are often served them with many typical toppings from caponata to ricotta and sun-dried tomatoes. Here, we had tomato, a creamy pistachio pesto and prosciutto, and mortadella with a nutty pistachio pesto. On the pinsa, we had the popular Sicilian pizza topping I’d been keen to try: a white mozzarella pizza with mortadella and pistachio pesto. Excellent, and something that made me very sad about the state of the slightly metallic mortadella we’re sold in the UK, which also does not come studded with pistachios. If you try to compare them after tasting this, you’ll realise they’re two very, very different products.
Via Maqueda in Palermo is something of the main tourist drag, and most of the businesses there reflect that. However, from the afternoon we arrived I noticed there were a few places swarming with locals instead, and Farinelli - a small shop selling Sicilian pizza by the slice (it’s got a thicker, focaccia-like dough and is served at room temperature) and a few popular street food items on the few tables outside - was one of them. For a light lunch after ordering a couple of Spritz (the mint-and-elderflower based Hugo is always my preference to an Aperol, but only in Italy where they make them properly, mostly in England the temptation is to use St Germain instead of elderflower cordial, and to add gin) we went for a few street-food and apero classics.
Chickpea fritters are a classic Sicilian snack, made by cooking down chickpea flour like polenta, chilling slabs, slicing them and frying them. The good ones we had around Sicily were piping hot, very slightly crisp on the outside and nice and creamy on the inside. With a good amount of salt and a douse of lemon these were an excellent example. The aranccini - with the classic filling of ham and mozzarella - were the best we had, beating out any full sized ones with a tender crust and delicate middle. And the caprese with burrata and pizza dough discard crackers was a perfect example of good ingredients treated simply, and a reminder that even the best home grown British tomatoes will never taste quite like the Italian ones.
On our final afternoon in Palermo we took a boat trip around the coast, and after my dip off the side in the Mediterranean a few glasses of a rough but lovely local white and a typical apero spread was much welcomed. Whenever you order a drink in Sicily you get something, from just a small bowl of nuts and crisps, to something a bit more substantial to snack on. On the boat what we had was very typical; sun-dried tomatoes, olives, little bready crispy bits, and a few bruschetta with caponata, which is what I’ve pictured with the sea in the background for an idea of how blue and beautiful it was.
Seafood & Pasta
On our first night in Palermo we went for the very traditional city trattoria experience. Lo Scudiero is somewhere you should book in advance, but you’ll likely get a table off season because Sicilians tend to arrive for dinner around 9pm, and if you’re from Northern Europe like me, or North America like I know so many of you are, we’re more likely to take a table when the restaurant opens at 7:30pm.
For those of you unfamiliar with a traditional Italian meal, it consists of 4 courses: the starter, the pasta course, the main course, and the dessert. At Lo Scudiero they’re quite rigid about this (indeed they were the only place that was) so if you order from different bits of the menu, your food will arrive at the ‘correct’ time regardless of what everyone else on the table is doing, so plan accordingly.
For sharing the hot mixed seafood ‘salad’ is a good first course with little bits of fried mixed fish, prawns, chickpea and gooey mozzarella fritters, but my pasta was one of the best pastas I had all trip: prawns, clams, and fried courgette slices. But, the main draw of Lo Scudiero is the old-fashioned catch of the day platter on ice that is wheeled around the dining room (the desserts are displayed the same way) where you choose your fish, and choose if you want it baked in a salt crust, pan fried, or baked with tomatoes and olives: we opted for the latter, and our bream was briefly shown to us whole in the baking dish before being whisked off to the other side of the dining room to be taken off the bone and portioned out between those of us sharing it.
Seven Restaurant was a much glitzier rooftop affair atop the Hotel Ambasciatori, where we ate on our second night. You also need to book, and book early as it has a sunset view (the above photo was a cloudy night!) therefore is popular for an earlier dinner, and draws the sort of crowd you’d get at any rooftop restaurant in any European capital city. But, even if that is not usually your thing, their very modern Sicilian menu is still not to be missed.
I went for a starter, then the pasta course followed by dessert (not pictured, but an excellent and clever jasmine panna cotta with chocolate, matcha and freeze dried raspberry textures). Working backwards, modern technique met local flavours in my incredible pasta. Cooked just to the edge of ‘al dente’, it was tossed in a fava bean / broad bean and wild fennel sauce, with a tartare of Mediterranean red prawns tossed in a chilled reduction of their own stock spooned over the top. It was both rich and light, and a very, very clever dish. The octopus too was well composed; perfectly tender, it came on a bed of pureed lentil, finished with flashes of pickled shallot, candied mandarin, and finished with wild fennel oil.
Pastries & Granita
You will be shocked to discover that I only had two gelato the entire 12 days we were in Sicily. Why? Because granita is so much better. I kept it safe in Palermo with an excellent, tangy, refreshing, simple lemon granita (Sicilian granita is not like the flaky stuff you make with a fork, it is slow churned to be smoother and more slushie-like) but it was only the start of my Sicilian granita flavour journey.
One thing we did struggle with in Palermo because we’re a family who either eat a lot of fruit and yogurt in the morning or simply avoid sweet foods entirely in favour of savoury was the breakfasts. A pistachio-paste stuffed Italian croissant (as I noted when I went to Tuscany, a bit softer, more brioche-like and much more to my liking than the French version) was delicious on the first day, and whilst I did also like this orange twist (with zest in the middle and glaze on the outside) on day two, but after day three we were praying our next hotel had something more ‘us’ for breakfast! I honestly don’t know how people manage that much sugar on any given morning!
As a general rule, if you’re sitting outside a bar in a residential area (we were staying at Palazzo Planeta, away from the main drag) sipping an Aperol Spritz and every few minutes a local comes up the street clutching the same paper bag from the same local bakery, you go to investigate.
On our last night in Palermo as there was a bottle of complimentary wine in each of our apartments (they’re owned by a family who also make wine) and my parents had the penthouse with a private balcony, we decided to get a couple of (brilliant) pizzas from Tondo around the corner, and get something from the bakery for dessert.
Panificio Bakery is a small, family-run bakery whose main focus is biscuits. Simple, unfussy biscuits that were not too hard, not too soft, not too jazzy, but simply excellent. We had a selection of different shaped and textured cookies all sandwiched or filled with different chocolate or pistachio fillings; special mention to the red chocolate version of the finger biscuits in the bottom left (those are the green pistachio ones pictures) with the texture of a tiramisu / trifle sponge just with slightly more structure.
Mercato Ballaro
Whilst it is not anything we specifically ate (see our post-market bruschetta and sharing mini-pizza above) I could not-not share photos from the bustling, vibrant Mercato Ballaro. Ambra explained that whilst the character of the market had changed somewhat since Forbes named Palermo the 5th best city in the world of street food in 2012 (and the top in Europe) to cater to all the tourists who started coming specifically to Palermo to try the street food, so much of it’s original character remains with fruit and vegetable stalls, family bakeries and fishmongers squeezed into the narrow street.
Meet cucuzza, or the ‘Sicilian' Zucchini’ which is very long, mild and pretty specific to the island, and tenerumi, it’s leaves (pictured in the bottom right of the right hand picture alongside the boxes of parsley, cucumbers and lettuce) both of which we were fascinated by, and both of which I’ll talk about in my next post (so remember this!) as I was lucky enough to try them both on the Agrigento leg of the trip. I remember at the time in Palermo being more fascinated by the tenerumi, actually, as it had never occurred to me that the leaves of a squash plant would be edible, seeming rather tough and slightly rough to me as a gardener (indeed, as my next instalment will show the tenerumi dish turned out to be the best one of the trip, yet when I was in the farmhouse kitchen earlier that day enquiring after the method for the cauliflower pasta they’d served the night before, I’d smelled the tenerumi being prepared and thought to myself ‘this is not food’!
The two bits of street food I’d wish I’d tried amongst the smoke and sounds of the market (the locals get a DJ in on most Sunday lunchtimes to accompany their lunch!) where the ropes of charred intestines being cooked above (I think the spleen sandwich shows I’ll try anything that comes from an animal I’ll ordinarily eat the meat of!) and the European-style fat salad onions, split down the middle and wrapped in bacon. At least those (unlike the intestines!) are something I can try and replicate at home.
More street food as well as restaurants lined the streets with everything from stuffed sardines and aubergines to big bowls of fried calamari, chickpea fritters and potato fritters (basically potato croquettes), and more spleen sandwich sellers. But more for the home eater, they also had lots of ‘takeaway’ options as seen in bakeries around Sicily, like big dishes of Sicilian baked pasta (Aneletti rings with a beef sauce and tomato) that families typically come together to eat at the weekend or for a celebration, here available in whatever portions you choose.
Right, I’m off to write about everything we ate on our Sicily road trip after we picked up the hire car and braved the hair-raising drive out of the city (I could write a very, very long essay on Sicilian motorists!) which I’ll share next, but in the meantime for some more travel inspiration this summer, you can find a few more of my food diaries below:
I’ve never had the guts (no pun intended) to try that pane con milza! It’s so good to see someone who really leaned in to Palermo in the way you did. I just got back myself. Do you miss it? Sicily is one of those places that either beckons or repels, nothing in the middle.