Brad Spurgeon's Blog

 
PLEASE NOTE THE UPDATED ADDRESS as of summer 2025. Since I wrote this post last summer the restaurant, unfortunately for all visitors and residents of Castellammare del Golfo, has moved to the neighboring town of Alcamo. So it is now the people and vistors of Alcamo only who can be treated by this amazingly original restaurant. Or you can drive to Alcamo from Castellammare, but don’t drink wine with your meal if you plan to drive back! V.le delle Fornaci Romane, 796, Alcamo, Italy. +39 366 196 5949 info@nescy.it nescy.it :

CASTELLAMMARE DEL GOLFO, Sicily – To my recollection I have written very few things about restaurants and dining on this blog. I do know that one of my most popular posts is an effort at writing a restaurant review that I did in 1991, at Joel Robuchon’s Jamin in Paris. And I also put up another unpublished restaurant review, that of Alain Passard’s Arpège, that I also wrote around that time. So if I am about to create a new category of blog post on great eating, please understand that it is because I find the following restaurant absolutely exceptional!

And since I have evolved a little bit since the 1990s, I have decided while writing these words that I will follow in my blog column rubric of “Not Reviews” to write about the amazing Nescy in this idyllic seafront town in northern Sicily. I have written Not Book reviews, Not Theater reviews and Not Film Reviews. This is my first Not Restaurant Review. The idea behind the Not Review, I remind you, is that I do not want to get on a writer’s high horse and pontificate on a subject in the way a traditional review does. Instead, this is just me writing about my impressions and feelings about a book, play, other, or in this case, restaurant.

Castellammare del Golfo is full of fabulous places to eat and drink. For a small town on the Sicilian coast, in fact, it seems exceptional the number of excellent restaurants. And they are located in various areas, like down the main Corso Garibaldi, or in the marina amongst the fishing boats, or up in the other main street by the park, municipal building and theater. That is partly why it took us years before we found and decided to try out a little unobtrusive place on the steep staircase beside the park leading up from the port (the Arab name for the town during its conquest – that was one of many, and started in 827 – was Al Madarig, which means, “The Steps”). This restaurant, Nescy, is not mentioned in the Michelin app, which only has a restaurant called Mirko’s, which we have been to twice. We have now been to Nescy, seven times – twice last year, and five times this year. And we will continue to go.

Why? Because Nescy is simply the most inventive, original restaurant in Castellammare del Golfo. It uses normal, but high quality ingredients, with often well known dishes, but the food is of a finished quality that is exceptional. It fills you with joy, in fact, a sense of “bien être,” or well being, and it is not deadly hard on the pocket book. Twice, for instance, three of us got out of there with three course meals and a bottle of wine for 105 euros.

To put the originality into a nutshell – excuse the food metaphor – this is a restaurant that serves dishes that range from classic Sicilian to street food taken to a higher level. The Nescy web site puts the emphasis on the street food side to their fare; but for me that does not do justice to the kind and level of what Nescy has to offer. Now that we have been so many times and with several members of the family, I have seen and tasted many of the dishes, and have a fairly complete view of both the food and the service. It is almost impossible to speak of favorite dishes, but there are ones I keep wanting to take again but do not do so as I want to try new things all the time.

On the street food side, the Coppu Russu Volante of battered and fried calamari and Mazara red shrimp and potatoes, all with Trapani sea salt, is astounding, especially with its extraordinary homemade ginger mayonnaise.

Another fabulous dish that is light enough to be served as a starter, is the smoked swordfish with watermelon, with its mandorla mayonnaise!

The starter called La Buatta, is fabulously original and very copious – as are virtually all the dishes. This is a jar of fresh little pieces, or cubs, of ham from “a little black pig,” as they told me – and sorry for the image if you are an animal lover – that is marinating in olive oil with laurel, nuts, garlic and oregano. Delicious and filling.

Among the simplest of the most original dishes was the mixed salad I took served in a bowl made of a kind of tortilla cracker that you could eat along with the salad! (The seafood salad, by the way, is also supberb.)

On the pasta side of things, the classic “Norma” has the freshest taste of pure tomato sauce I think I have ever had; while the “pasta allo scoglio” is the best mixture of spaghetti with mussels, squid, Sciacca pink prawns and scampi that I have had in Sicily. The seafood is big, thick and juicy.

Probably the most surprising pasta was the “Cala la pasta,” which is fresh pasta with ragù and colonnata lard of Nebrodi’s black pig – the same as the above mentioned starter – grains of Bronte’s pistachio, cosacavaddu ragusano cheese and stracciatella cheese. That cheese is making me hungry again as I write down these words! In short, it was rich and unctuous.

I could keep on listing the dishes but suffice it to say that each feels more original than the next as you make your way through numerous visits to this fabulous restaurant owned and run by a family from the neighboring city, Alcamo. And before I say anything more about them, I do want to save among the best of the food to the end, where it belongs:

The desserts are at the moment among the highest expression of the chef’s delightful imagination and approach to her work. (Anna Maria is all I know of her name, I apologize!) One night we were there, she invented a new dessert on the spur of the moment, that was not even on the menu. Literally, she decided to do something different and made an artwork out of panelle, which is not usually used in a sweet dish. She added ricotta mixed with bianco mangare, and blackfruit coulis.

A mainstay is the the “fried ice cream,” which is ice cream in a dough ball tossed into the hot oil, almost like a donut with ice cream inside.

But my favorite of all is the Tortino Florio, which is a kind of a hot spongecake with marmalade accompanied by the most creamy, beautiful ice cream with rosemary! You have to taste it to believe it.

The wine list, by the way, is short but solid, with several of the mainstay wines from the region – like Maria Costanza white, Terre della Baronia white, and a few grillo, an Inzolia, and our favorite for the moment, the Balhara, which is made from the local catarratto grape. All of them are more the reasonably priced by comparison to elsewhere, and our favorite is only 20 euros for the bottle.

As equally interesting as the food and ambience of this delightful restaurant is the story behind, and cohesion of, the family that founded and runs it. It was born of hardship in 2014: the patriarch of the family lost a very good job at the same time as one of the daughters encounter a health setback. They decided all together, with an idea from the son, to start their own business and not have to depend on working for other people. So they founded this restaurant and use some of the recipes and approaches to cooking of various family members. The result is a great success, even if it is probably more popular with non-Castallammarese clients than the locals.

Last night we went to a restaurant about 200 meters distant from Nescy and almost everything that can go wrong did go wrong, and it made me realize all the more just what a great evening of dining this family affair consists of. The service is impeccable, warm, and timely – you can press a little gadget on the table to get service whenever you want to; and the same gadget to call for the bill. In fact, the name of the restaurant has several related meanings: N-Nature E-Ethic S-Sicily C-Coppu Y-You…. But in Sicilian, Nesci means going out!

Follow @BradSpurgeon