From the wild and remote island of Filicudi off Sicily’s coast, Chef Giovanni Urbino shares the flavours of La Sirena, a restaurant that’s both refined and gloriously stuck in time.
Between service, the Chefs at La Sirena sit on plastic chairs in the tiny piazzetta that separates the sea and the restaurant, playing cards or chatting. It’s hard to imagine a more picturesque spot: waves lap against the pebble beach and small boats come in and out, sometimes bringing in a haul of freshly caught fish from the neighbouring islands of Alicudi and Salina.
At the helm is Giovanni Urbino, a 28-year-old from mainland Sicily who got a summer job in the Aeolians over a decade ago and has never really left. He learned to cook from his mother and grandmother before getting his first job on the islands at just 16. He worked on almost all seven of the inhabited islands in the archipelago, before settling for the rugged beauty of tiny Filicudi.
Now, Urbino lives here year-round. He thrives off the energy of the short, intense summer season, when visitors arrive by Superyacht or ferry to this often overlooked corner of Italy.
“I personally take care of selecting the raw ingredients,” Urbino tells me with some pride. “The fish is caught by fishermen from Filicudi, Alicudi and Salina, and the rest of the ingredients come from small local farms and allotments. Filicudian capers, cherry tomatoes, wild fennel, potatoes and oregano are some of the key ingredients I use to create simple dishes with real island identity.” For the store-cupboard essentials, two food vans come once a week from Sicily via ferry.
For the rest of the year, when the visitors go home and the island’s population drops to less than a hundred people, Urbino busies himself with foraging, experimenting in the kitchen and getting stuck in with supporting sustainability initiatives within the tiny community. “Together with the other islands, we’re working hard to be more conscious and to think carefully about ways we can use all our food waste for compost or animal feed, and look after the environment,” he explains.
When summer hits though, he’s at La Sirena round the clock, feeding visitors and islanders alike. “Cooking for me is an act of love towards the island, towards those who live here and those who come to discover it, even if only for an evening,” Urbino tells me with a grin. La Sirena is the kind of place you can rock up for dinner in shorts and a sun-bleached linen shirt after a day’s sailing. On the table next door might well be art dealers from Milan or tech billionaires, but you’d never know it, such is the charm of this place.
Antipasti includes platters of crudo di mare, stuffed sardines and a signature aubergine parmigiana with swordfish. There are plates piled high with fritti di mare, Aeolian-style fried seafood doused in lemon, as well as plenty of Sicilian specialities. For Urbino, though, it’s the pacchero allo scorfano – fat tubes of pasta with a rich scorpionfish ragu – that is his standout dish. The name Scorfano is a metaphor for ‘ugly’ in Italian, and it’s true that the bulging eyes and venomous spines of this red fish can be off-putting to the uninitiated. With careful filleting and a little know-how though, its flavour is divine, with the flakiness of monkfish and the richness of lobster. As Urbino explains, his pasta sauce “captures all the flavours and aromas of our seas”.
