Il Glicine

Holy heck, what a find! It was just about the only good choice in the little town of Spadafora, a great place (my grandfather is from there so that’s why we were visiting) and worth a stop if you have a few hours. The name has apparently changed several times and the current chef/​owner is in the wrong place (but right for us)! He belongs in an upscale restaurant in a big city, his cuisine is that good.
We had the chef’s tasting menu, 13! courses in all, which was absurdly cheap (about 20 euros if I remember right) and maybe 8 more for a great bottle of local «viagnier» (OK they can’t spell that well, but I do mean great, we are wine snobs). So for antipasti we got 7 (that’s right, seven) little gems that were absolutely exquisite, Almost all seafood, insanely fresh, creative and perfectly cooked. For the pasta we were treated to a great seafood risotto, but by that time my wife was stuffed, so I had the second course, a «sea bass» fillet done en Papillote (baked in parchment but he used what I think as a turkey bag, same principal), also with mussels and clams and fresh veggies. Even though I’m pretty sure it was branzino (everyone likes to call their fish sea bass these days) it was cooked perfectly.
Dessert was just OK, an obviously homemade strawberry ice cream that was frozen too hard but otherwise tasty. Brush up on your desserts and I would say you are ready for the big time. he came out to see what we thought and I told him he just about killed me with his food, he thought that was very funny. I said his was the freshest seafood we had in Italy and he pointed towards the sea, and said «from there». Probably caught the same day.
His sole waiter was friendly, he had been to NYC so he was pretty good at English. The owner’s family was eating a couple of his Sicilian pizzas next to us and I almost asked them for a taste, it looked that good. We joked with his brother about getting free food and he said he’d pay for it anyway (as would I if he offered it to me for free)!
PS. if you want the real «Stromboli» stuffed pizza (not a calzone!) as far as I know you have to be within sight of the famous volcano offshore from Milazzo. Spadafora was the only place I have seen it outside of a very few «true» US Italian restaurants, and it was delicioso at a little pizzeria we picked at random for lunch.