La Fenice

OK, so my blog is titled "Noel Eats Italy" - but thus far I've done little posting in the way of food (unusual for me!). That's about to change.

Friday we had both lunch and dinner at the hotel restaurant in Ragusa. This is the first Michelin starred restaurant I've tried in Italy, and you can definitely tell:

For lunch, Kyra and I each ordered an appetizer, and then split a pasta course. This was mine. It's a cylinder of crispy thin noodles that are about the width of a hair. On top is some kind of fruit jelly thing that I couldn't figure out. It's filled with goat cheese. The tomato sauce was outstanding. If you've ever had the oven roasted tomato, fennel and leek sauce I make from Thomas Keller's cookbook, it tastes like that (sweet and herbal), but it's a much finer texture, and mixed with olive oil.

And yes, the theme of many of the dishes at this place is sex, so if it looks like a giant pasta schlong, you're not far off.

This was Kyra's starter. It's a rice ball that's been fried crispy, however inside is poached eggs, with a slice of bacon.

This was a smoked fish carbonara, decorated with edible flowers and roe. The consistency of this fresh pasta was unreal - and they used even more egg in their carbonara than I do, so that's saying something!

This was the dessert dish with our lunch. Keeping with the sex theme, it's the cigarette afterwards. The cigarette was made of creme brule, while the smoke was cotton candy. The fire is crystalized sugar and orange, and the matches were compressed peanuts dipped on the end with chocolate. The ashes were tiny vanilla seeds from a vanilla bean!

La Fenice means "Finesse" - and this place certainly had that. Each course was so delicate in presentation that it was all very quite impressive. The amusing thing was that Kyra and I were the only two in the restaurant for lunch. It's rather off the beaten path, and typically is more known for dinner - but we'd been driving all day and were starving by the time we got there, so they happily fed us.

We would return for dinner, and it certainly didn't disappoint! As I type this blog update now, I'm actually sitting on my balcony in Agrigento, and it's getting a little cold out here, so I'm going to wait a little to post photos of the 7-course tasting menu that I tackled for dinner, but believe me when I say it's no less impressive.

Ciao!