I Tenerumi: Davide Guidara’s Hanging Garden

Therasia Resort — Vulcano, Aeolian Islands

On the eve of my arrival in Sicily, I lost my watch. It stayed inside a black pocket, under the seat, forgotten the way we forget things we believe we will have time to retrieve. I only noticed it on the ferry to Vulcano, when I looked at my wrist and found only skin. Was it a bad omen, or a trip that should never have happened? It no longer matters. That same evening left me with another impression: the sense of having encountered young talents still fine-tuning the final details of their voice. Twenty-four hours later, while the sun sank behind Lipari, I found myself at the counter of I Tenerumi. My initial impressions shifted completely: Davide Guidara is not searching. He has arrived.

Perhaps it was a Casio, perhaps an Omega. In truth, it no longer matters because in Vulcano, time obeys other laws. Here, time is measured in phases (Autumn/Winter, Spring/Summer) and counted through fermentations: three days for radicchio to lose its bitterness, seven for zucchini to gain a soul, an entire season to understand that vegetables have always known things we pretended we did not need to learn.

The Space

I Tenerumi does not feel like a restaurant. It feels like a pop-up built over a garden, essentially a greenhouse overlooking the sea. Glass walls, a spacious kitchen, a garden, and below, the Tyrrhenian Sea with Lipari and the sunset as a permanent backdrop. Two types of seating: tables for couples who want to look at each other with the sunset behind them, and a counter for those who prefer to look into the kitchen. I chose the kitchen.

Most cooks in the world work in basements, under artificial light, surrounded by stainless steel and the smell of burnt fat. Here, they work with a view over the Tyrrhenian and natural light until dusk. You can feel it. There is a calm in the execution that is not rehearsed. One of the cooks — he could not have been more than twenty-five — stopped midway through a preparation and looked at the sea for four, maybe five seconds, before returning to the plate as if nothing had happened. In another kitchen, that instant of distraction would be punished. Here, it felt like part of the job.

The Chef

Guidara comes from Cerreto Sannita, a small town in Campania where nothing happens — or everything does, depending on how one looks at childhood. At nine years old, he told his mother he wanted to be a cook; she, a literature teacher, likely thought it would pass. It didn’t. By fourteen, he was already working weekends in professional kitchens.

Instinct and determination carried on to the point where his path reads almost like an algorithm: Don Alfonso for discipline and classical foundations, Nino Di Costanzo and Il Mosaico for Neapolitan technique. Michel Bras taught him that a vegetable can be the protagonist of a story. Redzepi and Noma passed on the understanding that fermentation is far more than a trend or a technique.

When he was twenty-three, he took charge of his first kitchen, at Eolian in Milazzo. Carlo Passera of Identità Golose called him a “martian”, and it is hard to disagree. Today, at thirty, Guidara runs two Michelin-starred restaurants within the same resort. The safest path was right there: Il Cappero, a mono-protein kitchen, guaranteed praise. But Guidara deliberately chose a harder way — refusing animal fat to rescue a sauce, rejecting meat stock to build depth, forgoing butter to hide mistakes. Instead, he committed to vegetables, herbs, and flowers, pursuing the question: Is it possible?

In November 2025, the Michelin Guide awarded him a second star, making I Tenerumi, most likely, the only strictly vegetarian restaurant with two stars in the Western world. The Green Star for sustainability had been there since 2022.

The Structure

The menu unfolds in three phases, each built to reveal Guidara’s intent. A printed manifesto, “Cook More Plants”, accompanies the meal and explains: First, preservation — what Guidara saved from winter to serve in summer. Second, pure expression — what the land gives now, treated with fire, salt, and technique. Third, dessert. The phases might sound pretentious, but they function as a map to a territory most diners have never visited.

The Journey

Phase 1 — Preservations

Celeriac opens the menu. Fermented, shaped into tacos, and filled with red cabbage, horseradish mayonnaise, and pickled mustard seeds. A safe, technical opening, a gateway that establishes the language: controlled fermentation, multiple textures of the same ingredient.

Cauliflower arrives pickled, with hollandaise and dried black olives. The technique is competent and the flavors predictable. I must confess I have a difficult relationship with cauliflower — it insists on being bland, and I persist in hoping for change. This dish, despite flawless pickling, does not change my mind.

Radish follows — preserved with onion mayonnaise, apple compote, and sautéed radish leaves. This dish is better: bitter and smoky, with character. The apple adds necessary balance, while the leaves provide texture. It stands out as a dish that commands attention.

Broccoli appears chopped over toasted bread, with crispy chili oil and lemon cream. It is essentially a bruschetta — elevated, with Calabrian heat offsetting the richness and lemon freshness.

Celery served as a simple, fresh salad. A moment of rest and cleansing before what was to come.

Phase 2 — Pure Expression

And then, the zucchini. I stopped. I put down my cutlery. I listened to the chef explain, as if telling a story for the first time, how zucchini — so often dismissed as bland — had been dried, rehydrated, and matured in beeswax for seven days. Served with its own sauce and mint oil. It had the texture of ripe fruit, the depth of something fermented. It had a natural sweetness and an intensified flavour.

In that moment, I realised I knew less about vegetables than I thought — perhaps less about food than I believed. What I do know is that this is one of those dishes that justifies the journey.

Datterino tomato was an explosion. Cooked in lime, served with its own sauce enriched with red wine and lactic acid, finished with oregano, accompanied by grilled bread. On paper, it sounds like an ambitious trattoria dish. In the mouth, it is a bomb of umami — pure, without the shortcut of glutamate or industrial concentrate. Just tomato. Just the obsessive patience of a young chef who decided substance matters more than aesthetics.

A tomato salad follows — basil panna cotta, tomato seeds, tomato cream, Greek basil, and soy-marinated shallot. This dish offers a completely different experience from the previous one: fresh where the former was dense, light where the former was intense.

The bread at I Tenerumi deserves its own paragraph. Several types throughout the meal — buckwheat, rye, durum wheat, ancient Sicilian grains — all impeccable. At Il Cappero, I had already noticed the quality; here, the bar rises even higher, not to mention the rolled grissini and the brioche that arrives at the end.

The timilia tartlet with goat’s cheese, roasted and marinated beetroot, arugula cream, and miso. Solid, with flavours that naturally work together, no surprises.

Black lentils from Leonforte, with lentil miso, Sarawak pepper sauce, ground long pepper, and bay oil bring a depth that feels almost animal. The miso builds umami without animal protein. This is the menu’s pure comfort dish.

Radicchio, after seven days. Macerated in salt and vinegar, glazed and served with toasted yoghurt. The bitterness — the vegetable’s defining trait, the reason half the people reject it — has disappeared through technical intervention. What remains is depth, and the question: how long does it take to turn a flaw into a virtue? Or was bitterness ever truly a flaw?

Cardoncello — eryngii, as we like to call it — cooked under pressure, macerated and grilled, brushed with charcoal-grilled parsley paste, parsley stems, and paprika oil alla scapece. Meaty, precise, deeply satisfying.

Arugula with pineapple. Wild arugula grilled over charcoal, seaweed cream, paprika oil, and marinated pineapple. On paper, it raises eyebrows. When I heard the description, I thought: this is where the chef decides to be pretentious. I was wrong. On the plate, an unexpected harmony between charred bitterness and tropical acidity. The seaweed cream ties it all together. Strange, correct, and only possible when someone knows exactly what they are doing.

Finally, the layered roasted potato with potato cream au beurre blanc, aioli, red mustard leaves, and rosemary chimichurri. It delivers comfort but lacks surprise. By the time it arrived, my attention had shifted to dessert, and the potato seemed to agree with me — it did its job as a responsible potato and never demanded the attention of other dishes. For a potato in a tasting menu, perhaps this is ideal: satisfying, familiar, never distracting.

Phase 3 — Desserts

Dessert is once again the territory of Gianluca Colucci, the pastry chef responsible for the sweet chapters at Il Cappero. The language is uniform across both restaurants: apparent simplicity, technique, and precision.

Lemon arrives in four forms: meringue, spumone, namelaka, and fresh lemon. Four textures of the same citrus. I ate it in one bite, as instructed, and the acidity exploded against the roof of my mouth like waking abruptly from a long nap. Everything that came before — umami, depth, fermentation — was washed away. The palate was clean and ready to move on.

For centuries, carob was cocoa’s substitute for those who could not afford chocolate — the dessert of the contadini, sweetness for those who had no other. Colucci serves it as cream, reduction, crumble, and sorbet. Four techniques applied to an ingredient that has been ignored by fine dining for so long. A piece of Sicily, an act of historical repair disguised as dessert.

The brioche arrived warm and fluffy, made with natural yeast and served with mango, passion fruit, and lime sorbet, plus cubes of fresh fruit. Tropical, indulgent, excessive — an enormous brioche, wonderful, entirely mine, set to plunge into the freshness of the sorbet as Sicilian tradition dictates. I couldn’t finish it; my body was full and asked for nothing more. Still, in the days that followed, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t taken the rest with me.

A Pairing Without Wine

I began with champagne, of course, as any proper meal should. Soon after, we moved to the non-alcoholic pairing: kombuchas, cordials, ferments. Beet-fermented ginger beer for the winter snacks. Kombuchas in different flavours — a journey through mango and papaya, lavender, and black tea. Tropical cordials, red fruits, even coffee.

Each drink makes sense with the dish it accompanies. But the portions are so small that the drink ends before the food. It is like Hans Zimmer composing the perfect soundtrack for a film, only for us to watch it in silence. The content is there. The volume is not. It is the only adjustment this service needs. A detail, some may say, but here all details matter.

Final Note

Throughout the menu, Guidara made me think of a young Niko Romito. Not in aesthetics — Romito embraces bitterness, the most primal and profound flavour of each ingredient. Guidara transforms and pursues umami, satiety, the sense of having eaten something substantial without animal protein. The similarity lies elsewhere: in the simplicity of plating, the risks taken, the design of an Italian cuisine that resembles no other.

I arrived at Therasia and I Tenerumi with moderate expectations, thinking of lost watches, fatigue, and hours of travel. I left thinking about the garden, about how much remains to be done, and how much the land gives us that we fail to value. I left with zucchini, chicory, and tomatoes on my mind. The night before, Il Cappero had proven solid and coherent. Here, I expected the same, with less protein and more risk. I moved from sceptic to convert, convinced I had experienced one of the finest meals of 2025 — for the element of surprise, for the absolute novelty of each dish, for the rare sensation of never having eaten anything quite like this. In a context where tasting menus replicate themselves from New York to Lisbon using the same techniques and Instagram references, this is rare.

Guidara works without pasta, without risotto, without luxury branding on the plate, and without the aggressive marketing that pushes other Italian chefs of his generation onto magazine covers before they have much to show. Guidara has something to show: a voice, a philosophy. What he lacks, for now, is media charisma and fluent English to help the world start looking at Vulcano differently. That will come.

Will I return?

Yes — without a watch, and with one certainty: Sometimes, the most difficult journey leads exactly where it should.