At I Tenerumi on Vulcano, Davide Guidara earned two Michelin stars without caviar, crustaceans, or meat.
When Davide Guidara was first invited to take over a restaurant at a resort on Vulcano, the southernmost of Sicily’s seven Aeolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, he wasn’t sure he should accept. He’s originally from Campania on the mainland and was already running a restaurant in Sicily’s second city, Catania. Moving to such a small, remote island was a risk. “After six proposals, I accepted, but on one condition: I wanted complete freedom to create an incredible restaurant with only vegetables and one delicious menu.”
The owners of Therasia, the luxury resort where he would cook, agreed. I Tenerumi opened in 2021 and earned its second Michelin star four years later, surprising even Guidara. “I break every rule of normal fine dining—with the music, the waiters, the service, everything,” he says with some pride. He had kept vegetables at the center of his cooking despite warnings from friends and colleagues. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t do it. You’re a very talented guy. Why make this strange move?’” he recalls. “If everyone says no, maybe I should say yes,” he considered.
There’s no meat on the menu, but Guidara calls I Tenerumi a vegetable-focused restaurant rather than a vegetarian one. Its name refers to the tender leaves, shoots, and tendrils of the Sicilian long squash. But he knew that cooking a vegetable with olive oil and serving it would hardly justify the move. “It’s boring,” he says. The techniques used in each dish had to expand what he could do with a vegetable while keeping its flavor recognizable. “If you have ten elements on a dish, one part is too sweet, another is more acidic, another is crunchy. For me, that’s confusion.”
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