In Sicily, Tasting Seafood With a Skeptical Son [View all]

“So here’s the plan,” I told my 8-year-old son, Luke. “We’re going to different restaurants every day and eat new things every meal.”

"What do they eat in Sicily?”

“A lot of fish.”

“Can’t you write about something else?”

I am a passionate angler and writer on the oceans, and Sicily had been for me the coveted fishy bull’s-eye at the center of the Mediterranean, a place where seafood is brought to table transformed by an ancient mélange of European and North African cookery. My son, though, has a landlubber’s palate and a tendency toward the plain. But when opportunity arose to journey to Sicily, I decided it was time to escape our child-imposed culinary straitjacket.

On the advice of the cookbook author Nancy Harmon Jenkins, I chose four distinct centers of Sicilian cookery: Palermo, Trapani, Catania and the hill towns around Ragusa. Along the way my partner, Esther, and I would offer Luke tiny bribes: a soccer game in Palermo, a salt marsh with flamingos in Trapani, a hike up to Mount Etna’s caldera. But the center of it all would be seafood, and lots of it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/travel/sicily-seafood-restaurants.html?