10/11/2025: We had an incredible dinner at MEC. The food and wine options are amazing and the decor and staff provide an unforgettable experience! Highly recommended
02/11/2025: A dinner that was a journey through techniques, ingredients, and bubbles. I went to the MEC Restaurant in Palermo for an evening event: a four-handed dinner with Carmelo Trentacosti and chef Alessandro Mecca, paired with a selection of Steinbrück and Vieille France Champagnes.
The museum-restaurant, housed in a historic building opposite the Cathedral, is where elegance is never ostentatious, but meticulously crafted. Soft lighting, minimal furnishings, and a suspended atmosphere leave room for the experience.
The journey begins with "Pasta e tenerumi," but not as you'd expect: elegant, transformed comfort food.
Then comes the reconstructed cherry tomato—a small work of art that looks like a fruit but actually encapsulates all of Sicily.
Shrimp, cherry, and orange granita surprise you with their sweetness and acidity. Pane e ricci is like a salty caress.
Then comes a beautiful and sublime tomato Bavarian cream with burrata and Aspra anchovies: precise, colorful, perfectly balanced.
The buttered escalope from Mecca is a stylish exercise in simplicity, followed by the smoked mackerel fillet from Trentacosti, with saffron, sweet and sour onion, and caper powder: a real treat. Then comes the risotto with black lemon and bottarga: savory, creamy, elegant. The monkfish ossobuco is a second course disguised as seafood comfort food.
The roast lamb closes the savory portion, before two desserts that compete in aesthetics and flavor:
– a creamy and compact hazelnut cake
– a cacio e pear tart with beetroot ice cream and fennel powder that stunned everyone (in a good way).
The Champagnes were a perfect match: bubbles never intrusive, but present, accompanying each step with personality. And the final coffee? A single-origin Peruvian, perfectly roasted, with a clean finish.
An unforgettable dinner.
Not just for the menu, but for the entire setting. I was pampered, inspired, and felt part of something special. And in such a setting, everything seemed to make even more sense.
Google
TripAdvisor