La Madia

La Madia is a restaurant with two Michelin stars on Corso Filippo Re Capriata in Licata, Sicily, Italy. Its chef and owner, Pino Cuttaia, runs it with his wife Loredana and reworks the traditional cooking of the island.

Cuttaia moved to Turin with his family as a child and later worked in a factory before he turned to cooking, training at Sorriso in Soriso and then at the Patio in Pollone, both in Piedmont. He came back to Licata in 2000 to open La Madia, which won its first Michelin star a few years later and its second after that. Identità Golose has described the restaurant as a store of memories and of yeast, and Cuttaia was the only Italian chef among the speakers at a congress in Madrid.

A renovation in 2016 by Architrend Studio, led by Gaetano Manganello and Carmelo Tumino, transformed the room with very little demolition. Long white tablecloths and armchairs upholstered in dark leather fill it, and Sicily is honoured in two spaces with square lines and no caricature. Cuttaia has also opened Uovodiseppia, a bistro in Milan at the Ariosto Social Club, but Licata remains his base.

His best-known creation, the uovo di seppia, is an emptied eggshell filled with a paste of cuttlefish, and it became the emblem of an Identità Golose congress. The quadro di alici treats anchovies with seawater and ice and pairs them with squid-ink charcoal and a mayonnaise of tuna roe. Cod has been smoked over pine cones in the pizzaiola style, squid ravioli filled with tinnirume di cocuzza, and amberjack cooked in ash oil. An arancino with a ragù of red mullet and wild fennel, and a cannolo shaped as a cornucopia with ricotta and orange jam, turn familiar Sicilian classics into courses.