One of Italy’s Most Radical Kitchens Is on a Volcanic Cliff in Sicily

Amid Italy’s Aeolian Islands, sunset turns the sea the glowing hue of red pepper juice as dinner unfolds on a seaside cliff like a lucid dream of a new kind of Italian food. A young chef leaves a boxy, glass-walled kitchen to survey a neat lawn. On it, people sit under palm trees, just some 20 to 24 diners a night, all eager to try his radical meals. There is no meat. There is no fish. There is not even pasta.

There are only plants — plants that bare their souls and speak to this place: Vulcano, a tiny island of volcanic mud baths, sulfur wafts, and black-sand beaches just north of mainland Sicily. The chef, Davide Guidara, has said, “the zucchini is my Ferrari.”

Guidara oversees the kitchen at I Tenerumi, a name that signifies the tender shoots of the long Sicilian cucuzza squash, which is prized in Sicily’s Aeolian Islands and on the mainland. After cooking in Michelin-starred kitchens in Italy and France, he opened I Tenerumi at Therasia Resort in 2022, quickly earning two stars of his own (plus a green star). Guidara, who split time growing up between his father’s native Sicily and his mother’s Naples, is just 32 years old, with the intensive spirit of “Cook More Plants,” a manifesto he started.

“I wanted something different compared to vegetarian or vegan,” he says, “a different vision of the plant world, to also partly change the mainstream culture.”

Guidara believes Vulcano is a fecund spot for his novel cooking. Among the far sea rocks seen from I Tenerumi, Christopher Nolan filmed seafaring parts of The Odyssey. The island is where the ancient Romans believed Vulcan, the fire god, kept his forge. Guidara says the heat, lack of freshwater, and volcanic soil make ingredients “hardier” and “more intense,” with “more umami.”

I Tenerumi keeps on-site gardens, rows of standout plants like tiny sweet datterino (plum) tomatoes, cornetto peppers, and glorious Neapolitan striped zucchini. On a recent summer evening, zucchini landed about midway through a 14-course tasting. A stout strip shone a glossy algae-green, with a few darker green drops atop. Simple. Yet its simplicity belied, in Guidara’s words, una complessità nascosta, a hidden complexity. 

He begins by steaming zucchini, then dries it out before rehydration. Next, he ages it for 10 days in beeswax. After breaking the beeswax, he roasts the zucchini and then marinates it. On the plate, there are “no foams, no tuiles, no bullshit.” One bite sparks a detonation. This zucchini tastes so intensely like itself it feels like a hallucination.

Guidara started developing this dish in September 2023 and first served it in July 2025. He went through 170 kilograms of zucchini in the process.

The meal unfolds in a rainbow of visually simple, wildly laborious dishes, with sublimely attentive service and an armada of amaro, kombucha, juice, cocktail, and other liquid pairings. The red sun lowers. The volcano breathes sulfur. The meal goes on. 

There’s a bowl of black lentils, a storied crop in Sicily and its islands. Guidara simmers them in a stock of roasted vegetables high in glutamic acid for more umami. Lentil miso compounds it further and sunflower seed butter adds creaminess, whisking the legume to deep, dark zones of flavor.

There’s roasted pepper in pepper sauce served with a glass of cold pepper juice. Twice-cooked cornetto peppers soak in a pepper-water marinade before getting brushed with a glaze of roasted peppers and pomegranate, paired on the plate with a rich, Sicilian-almond muhammara. It’s a wildly peppery pepper, balanced by sips of bracing pepper juice.

In the school of Cook More Plants, lentils do not become a burger and peppers do not become a pepper sausage. Plant ingredients receive treatments that celebrate them. “If you have a very beautiful car like a Ferrari, would you customize it?” Guidara asks and answers. “No.”

In this spirit, the chef takes Sicily’s prized datterino tomatoes, removes the skins, and nixtamalizes them like corn for tortillas, creating a firm exterior. He then sun-dries the tomatoes, just like those on wooden boards in Sicily’s mountain hinterlands in high summer.

Like rubies, the tomatoes lean in tomato sauce gently spiked with red wine. Bunches of wild oregano bring them to high life. 

“It’s very simple, but it’s one of those that hits everyone the hardest,” Guidara says. 

He often lingers just beyond his glass kitchen, taking in the dining lawn as a giant maritime sunset bleeds into twilight. Guests seem lost in the elemental charms of Vulcano, enjoying a familiar but new universe of vegetables.

For ages, vegetables have been revered in Italy. The oldest surviving cookbook from the Western World, the ancient Roman De re Coquinaria (also known as Apicius), devotes an entire book to plants, detailing how to stew apricots, wine-braise leeks, and fry carrots. Today, the fleeting seasons of wild plants like barba di frate are local events. In the Italian South, there is a deep tradition of foraging edible weeds. 

On this raw island of barrel cactus, red suns, and old gods, vegetables taste a bit like a revolution, or like an evolution of this tradition.

Guidara wants others to follow his lead, to dream big with plants. “For me, the zucchini inherently is a Ferrari, just like a duck can be a Ferrari,” he says. “It’s the same thing.”