Me Cumpari Turiddu In Catania

A restaurant that simply must be enjoyed. Aim for the staff's recommendations!

The best traditional Italian restaurant in Catania. The food is outstanding, the dishes are prepared with high quality local ingredients. Highly recommended it.

Excellent place to eat in the center of Catania. The atmosphere is welcoming, the place is very well-maintained and clean, and the staff is friendly and attentive, but not too intrusive. The food is truly delicious; I highly recommend their Pasta alla Norma, a Sicilian classic. The price is perfectly in line with the quality of the place itself, and fair for the amount we ate.

Excellent Sicilian cuisine reworked

A refined atmosphere, friendly service, and good food. Slow food dishes, tasty and carefully prepared with excellent ingredients. Excellent wine list. Very friendly service. I ordered a coffee at the end of the meal, but when paying, the owner noticed that I had left it because it was too strong for my taste and asked for a refill, apologizing. These are the things that demonstrate the attention and care put into the work. The price was reasonable for what we ate and drank. I recommend it, we'll be back.

During our tour of Sicily, we stumbled upon Me Cumpari Turiddu. As a Michelin-recommended restaurant, we gave it a go! Highly recommended for value. Lovely large glasses of wine, reasonable prices for food and drinks, and that for central Catania. The setting is beautiful and there's plenty of seating. Highly recommended for the area.

Excellent cuisine...good service...friendly staff! I also recommend it for its excellent value...beautiful location too!

Me Cumpari Turiddu: Where the Locals Eat (and What That Actually Means) There are restaurants for tourists, and then there are restaurants where the tourists have not yet arrived—or have arrived, looked at the menu, and promptly left. Me Cumpari Turiddu in Catania falls decisively into the latter category. This is where the locals go. One knows this not from any sign or advertisement but from the atmosphere itself: that particular vibe of a place that exists for its own community, that has no interest in explaining itself or apologizing for what it is. The wine list confirms this—local reserves, the kind that never make it onto international lists because they’re drunk here, by people who know. We ordered with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. The menu offered local fare, which is to say: food that comes from this specific place and no other, whether or not the wider world is ready for it. Donkey, for instance. We did not order the donkey. This is not a judgment, merely a confession. Every traveler has their limits, and ours, apparently, do not extend to equines, however traditionally prepared. What we did eat: salads and vegetables that were divine—this word is not hyperbole but accurate description. Things pulled from Sicilian soil have a different quality than things pulled from elsewhere. The tubular meats (I leave the specific taxonomy to others more versed in Italian charcuterie) were excellent. The local cheeses—creamy, tangy, perfect against the local bread—reminded us that cheese is not a monolith but a conversation between milk, time, and place. And then: my fresh grilled tuna. It tasted, if I’m honest, a little off. Not dangerously so—I’m still here to write this—but off. That slight edge that suggests the fish was perhaps not as fresh as advertised, or had been held slightly too long, or had been handled in some way that compromised it. These things happen, even in Sicily, even in restaurants where locals eat. The Nero d’Avola helped. It always does. A good Sicilian red can wash down a multitude of sins, culinary and otherwise. At the end we waited for the waiter to bring the check which never came. We watched the locals who when done stood up and paid at the front. As did we. Would we return? Yes, though perhaps we’d order differently. The pleasure of Me Cumpari Turiddu is not perfection but authenticity—that increasingly rare quality of a place that refuses to be anything other than itself. This is what we travel for, isn’t it? Not the sanitized, the safe, the guaranteed. But the real, the local, the challenging. The meal that reminds us we are somewhere particular, eating what the people here eat, for better and occasionally for worse. The Nero d’Avola, I should mention, was superb.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This is the first time I'm writing a review, and it had to be here. At Me Cumpari Turiddu, you don't dine, you travel. From the donkey carpaccio to the black pork roll with pistachios, each dish tells a Sicilian story. Soulful cooking, impeccable service, and an unforgettable closing: the sweet couscous of the Santo Spirito nuns. Ten out of ten.

Just expensive average food dirty lace placemats