Ristorante Don Camillo

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Family Table, Four Decades in the Making

Ristorante Don Camillo has been a fixture on Via delle Maestranze in Ortigia since 1985, when the Guarneri family first opened its doors in one of Siracusa's most storied corners. The setting alone earns attention: the dining room sits beneath magnificent Catalan vaulted ceilings, the kind of architecture that makes the ancient island quarter of Ortigia so distinctive. What began as a family venture — founded alongside "Camillo," the chef's father — has grown into one of southern Italy's most consistently recognised Italian cuisine destinations.

Chef Giovanni Guarneri

The kitchen belongs to Giovanni Guarneri, a chef by vocation and by inheritance. He absorbed his father's gastronomic sensibility from the start, then built on it through decades of restless experimentation. His philosophy is rooted in an intimate knowledge of raw ingredients — memorising flavours, understanding provenance, imagining how familiar products behave under different techniques and pairings. Every dish, as the restaurant puts it, has its roots, a narrative, a place, a story that the chef transfers from life to the plate.

What makes Guarneri's approach distinctive is his willingness to look beyond Sicily without abandoning it. Sicilian elements dominate the menu, but outside ingredients are welcomed with curiosity and integrated with balance — creating what he calls nuove tradizioni, new traditions. The result is a cuisine that is immediately recognisable: clean, grounded in territory, and always evolving.

The Menu

Two tasting menus anchor the experience. The Miteco (€100, wines excluded) moves through the sea in confident strokes: red prawns marinated in gin and Maldon salt on oyster mayonnaise with crispy seaweed, smoked with juniper; a cube of cuttlefish filled with black ink sauce; and cod fillet with saffron from the Iblean Mountains and courgette cream. It closes with an Evoluzione di Cassata Siciliana — the island's most iconic dessert, rethought.

The Archestrato (€90, wines excluded) takes a broader view, ranging from a passatina of Leonforte broad beans with crispy salt-cod fritters to ravioloni of braised beef with Sicilian butter, sage and Ragusano cheese, and a beef fillet with cooked grape must and wild vegetables. Both menus are served to the whole table.

The wine programme has earned a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence — a mark of a cellar curated with the same seriousness applied to the food. Sommelier Vincenzo oversees the list and the service.

The Room and the Team

The brigade — kitchen and front-of-house together — works toward a single goal: the best possible experience for every guest. The atmosphere, framed by those Catalan vaults, is one of warmth and quiet confidence, the kind that comes from nearly forty years of practice in the art of hospitality.