07/13/2026
Every few years, I return to Sicily hoping to bring home new recipes, new ingredients, and fresh ideas for La Forchetta.
After three weeks of eating, observing, and experiencing Sicily again, everyone is going to ask:
“What did you learn?”
“What new ideas did you bring back?”
The answer surprised me.
I went looking for culinary inspiration—but instead, I came home with a new appreciation for the creativity already inside our kitchen, the culture our grandparents preserved, and everything our family built after coming to America.
This trip taught me much more than a new recipe ever could.
This is my story… 🇮🇹❤️🇺🇸
🇮🇹 I WENT TO SICILY LOOKING FOR NEW IDEAS—AND CAME HOME APPRECIATING WHAT WE HAD ALREADY CREATED 🇺🇸
Usually, I return to Sicily every few years hoping to bring home new ideas—especially new recipes and inspiration for our restaurant.
It had been two years since my last visit, and after spending three weeks eating my way through Sicily, I have to admit something:
I was a little disappointed.
Not because the food was bad. Sicily has beautiful ingredients, and many dishes are delicious. But almost every restaurant seemed to offer the same traditional items, just executed slightly differently.
Swordfish. Tuna. Orata.
Usually roasted or simply prepared.
Eggplant and zucchini were the vegetables we saw most often. The pasta menus repeated many of the same classics: pasta alla Norma, pesto Trapanese, pasta with swordfish and eggplant, and variations using the same familiar local ingredients.
And chicken?
Forget about it.
You will not find chicken Parmesan or chicken Marsala on every restaurant menu because those are Italian-American dishes—not traditional Sicilian restaurant food. If Sicilians want chicken, they usually go to a polleria and buy it rotisserie-style.
Most menus had a carne section, but grilled steak was usually the main offering. We found a veal fillet at one restaurant during the entire trip. Maybe Sicily is simply too hot during the summer for everyone to sit around eating heavy meat dishes. Honestly, after walking around in that heat, I understood. 😂
But I had gone there wearing two hats: one as a Sicilian-American returning to a place I love and another as a restaurant owner looking for inspiration.
After three weeks, I realized something that made me incredibly proud:
Our menu is stronger and more creative than I gave us credit for.
We respect traditional Italian ingredients, but we are not afraid to use imagination. We create. We experiment. We take ingredients we know and give them our own personality.
We have fantasia.
People often call us an “Italian restaurant,” but I have never loved that description. We are Italians who own and operate a restaurant. There is a difference.
We are not trying to imitate Italy or decorate a dining room around an American idea of what Italy should be. The food comes from who we are, how we were raised, what our family taught us, and everything we have learned through generations of cooking and restaurant life.
Once I realized I was not coming home with a notebook full of new recipes, I started paying attention to something else:
The culture.
The people.
The service.
The lifestyle.
And that created even more questions.
DID OUR GRANDPARENTS PRESERVE A SICILY THAT NO LONGER EXISTS?
Growing up, we heard one phrase constantly:
La famiglia.
Family first.
Sunday dinners. Everyone around the table. Working hard. Respecting your parents and grandparents. Learning the language. Helping one another. Never forgetting where you came from.
But after watching modern life in Sicily for three weeks, I started wondering:
What if the version of Sicilian family culture we grew up with is no longer completely Sicilian?
What if it became Italian-American?
Our grandparents left Sicily for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other parts of America decades ago. They left their country—but they did not leave their culture behind.
They carried it with them.
They preserved Sunday dinner. They protected family traditions. They passed down recipes without measurements. They taught their children to work hard because opportunity was never something they took for granted.
Maybe while Sicily continued changing, immigrant families held tightly to the Sicily they remembered.
Maybe our grandparents preserved a version of the culture that existed when they left.
And maybe la famiglia, as we know it, grew even stronger because they were building new lives far away from home and needed one another to survive.
That realization hit me harder than any new recipe could have.
DRIVING IN SICILY IS AN EXTREME SPORT
Then there was the driving.
Sicilians drive as though every person has been personally assigned ownership of the entire road.
A two-lane highway?
Apparently, that is merely a suggestion.
They will somehow turn two lanes into four, squeeze four lanes back into two, cut directly in front of you with approximately three inches to spare—and continue driving without emotion.
No horn.
No yelling.
No apology.
No anger.
Meanwhile, I am sitting in the passenger seat wondering how we nearly died three times just trying to buy bread.
The strangest part is that no one seems personally offended. There is almost a shared understanding:
I cut you off today. You cut me off tomorrow. We all get where we are going eventually.
In America, someone would have already followed you into a parking lot over that maneuver. 😂
SOME PROBLEMS HAVE BECOME TOO NORMAL
There were also things that were harder to laugh about.
The trash along certain streets was upsetting. The graffiti seemed heavier than I remembered. Some beautiful areas looked neglected.
Then there were the unofficial parking attendants—the parcheggiatori abusivi.
You park in what appears to be a public space, and suddenly someone expects a euro or two to “watch” your car.
Nobody officially hired them.
Nobody asked for their service.
Yet somehow, you feel like paying might be cheaper than returning to a scratched rental car.
People know it happens. Authorities know it happens. Locals know it happens.
But it continues.
That was one of the things I struggled to understand: how certain problems become so normal that people simply learn to live around them.
ITALIANS DO NOT EAT THE WAY AMERICANS THINK THEY DO
Restaurant menus were organized exactly like ours:
Antipasti.
Primi.
Secondi.
But despite what many Americans believe, most people were not ordering all three courses.
They chose a pasta—or they chose a meat or fish entrée.
Not everyone ordered an appetizer, followed by a $20 pasta, followed by another $25 entrée.
First, Italians generally do not eat enormous portions.
Second, they are not spending money unnecessarily just because a menu is divided into courses.
And this reminded me of a negative review we once received from someone who criticized the way our menu was organized.
Our menu was not confusing.
It was Italian.
The difference is that Italians understand that the headings explain what type of dish something is—not necessarily a mandatory eating challenge requiring every course.
THEY MAY SPEND DIFFERENTLY—BUT THEY SUPPORT THEIR COMMUNITIES
One thing I admired was that people were always out.
They may not spend extravagantly. They may order one dish instead of three. But they consistently support the businesses around them.
The bakery.
The gelateria.
The café.
The neighborhood restaurant.
The street-food vendor.
There is a time and place for everything.
Between approximately 5:00 and 7:00, we watched people stop for street food, probably after work. Later, they went home, showered, ate with family, or went back out.
Before dinner, there might be an aperitivo at a bar.
Dinner often did not begin until 8:00 or 9:00 and could last until 11:00.
And when Italians go out to dinner, they actually dine.
They sit.
They talk.
They enjoy their company.
They are not staring at the clock expecting drinks, appetizers, entrées, dessert, the check, and emotional closure within 45 minutes.
Which brings me to my questions for Americans visiting Italy:
Do you demand a refund because you did not love your pasta?
Do you ask for a manager because the server did not immediately appear?
Do you complain because the server waited and took the drinks and food order together instead of returning five separate times?
Do you become angry because dinner lasted two hours?
Do you road-rage every time someone cuts you off—or do you eventually accept that traffic laws are apparently open to artistic interpretation?
And most importantly:
Do you attempt to order chicken Parmesan or chicken Marsala?
I genuinely need answers. 😂
I AM PROUD TO BE ITALIAN—AND GRATEFUL I WAS RAISED IN AMERICA
After three weeks, I came home without the new recipes I expected.
Instead, I came home with perspective.
Sicily is still beautiful. The food is rooted in tradition. The markets, landscapes, history, beaches, and familiar smells still bring me back to childhood.
But Sicily has changed.
Maybe I have changed too.
Maybe returning to the place your family came from teaches you that heritage is not frozen in one country.
Culture travels.
It changes.
It grows.
Our grandparents left Sicily to create better opportunities for their families. They brought their recipes, language, traditions, faith, work ethic, Sunday dinners, and love of family with them.
Then they added something new:
Gratitude for opportunity.
Pride in hard work.
The determination to build something better for the next generation.
I am proud to say I am Italian.
But after this trip, I am equally grateful that I was raised in America by a family that never allowed us to forget where we came from.
Maybe we did not lose the culture when our families left Sicily.
Maybe they protected the best parts of it.
And maybe, generation after generation, we added a little fantasia of our own.
I may not have returned with a notebook full of new recipes, but I came home more confident in who we are, what we create, and what La Forchetta represents.
We are not trying to imitate Italy. We are Italians who own and operate a restaurant—and everything we serve carries a piece of our family’s story. ❤️
La Forchetta Ristorante & Pizzeria�📍 7820 SW Lost River Rd., Stuart, FL
