Davide Guidara turned down the job five times before he said yes. The chef from Campania was already running a restaurant in Catania, Sicily's second city, when he was courted to open a dining room at Therasia, a luxury resort on Vulcano, the southernmost of the Aeolian Islands. Six proposals later he finally agreed — but only if he could do exactly what he wanted: one tasting menu, built entirely around vegetables.

It was a gamble. Friends and colleagues told him not to do it, warning that a meat-free, crustacean-free fine dining restaurant on a remote island of a few thousand residents would never work. Four years after I Tenerumi opened in 2021, it collected its second Michelin star — with no caviar, no shellfish, no meat anywhere on the menu. Guidara himself was surprised. He also cheerfully admits he breaks the usual fine-dining rules, from the music to the service style.

The restaurant takes its name from the tenerumi — the tender leaves, shoots and tendrils of the Sicilian long squash, a classic ingredient in the island's home cooking. Guidara is careful about the label, though: he calls his place vegetable-focused rather than vegetarian. The point, he says, isn't to pile vegetables on a plate. Simply cooking one in olive oil would be, in his words, boring. Instead he uses technique to stretch what a vegetable can do while keeping its flavour unmistakable. He's also a minimalist: a dish with ten elements — something sweet, something acidic, something crunchy — reads to him as confusion.

Why should travellers care? Because Vulcano itself is reason enough to cross the sea: a brooding volcanic island with steaming fumaroles, sulphur-scented mud baths and black-sand coves, an hour or so by hydrofoil from Milazzo in Sicily. Until recently, eating well there meant simple seafood and granita. Now it has one of the most decorated kitchens in southern Italy, and a meal doubles as a tour of Sicilian garden produce most visitors never see on a plate. For anyone island-hopping the Aeolians — Salina's capers, Lipari's old town, Stromboli's eruptions at dusk — it's a new anchor for the itinerary, and proof that Italy's most interesting fine dining isn't only in the cities.

Note the practicalities: the restaurant sits inside a luxury resort, on a seasonal island where hotels and ferry schedules thin out sharply outside summer, so plan ahead and book well in advance. And go hungry for vegetables — that's the whole menu.