VIVA IL BISTROT is Viviana Varese’s new restaurant in Palazzo Nicolaci, Noto

Resident Chef Ida Brenna.

Love for Sicily grows with another venue following the W Villadorata Country Restaurant run by Resident Chef Matteo Carnaghi.

VIVA IL BISTROT is a place that seeks above all to be a welcoming environment, a culinary embrace,  where wine is given important space. 

The cuisine has the fragrance of the Mediterranean as the choices served at the tables draw from the  different gastronomic cultures of the Mare Nostrum basin. 

The menu has dishes from the southern and Sicilian tradition, with some incursions from the Middle East  and North Africa. 

The wine list – created by Sommelier Valentina Rizzi – also embraces the idea of encounter and  contamination and thus includes choices from countries bordering the same sea, with labels from Greece,  Morocco, Spain and France. 

The spaces are inside the most beautiful building in Noto, Palazzo Nicolaci, from the mid-eighteenth  century, designed in pure Baroque style. VIVA IL BISTROT occupies what were the cellars of the  residence: ogival arches and barrel vaults span large, cool rooms built in the typical sedimentary stone of the  area, with warm, delicate colours. The environment is made dynamic and contemporary by art and  design, with furniture selected by the owner of the location, Cristina Summa. 

Art also has its own stage in VIVA IL BISTROT, thanks to collaboration with the Spazionoto Art Gallery  owned by Paolo Perrelli, a neighbour of the restaurant. Well-known figures have exhibited here, including  the director Pedro Almodovar and actress Eva Robin’s. The project is a kind of extension of the walls of  Spazionoto to those of VIVA IL BISTROT, which becomes an additional exhibition gallery for national  and international artists, who will alternate through the seasons, colouring and lighting up the walls of the  bistrot. 

The Menu reflects Ida Brenna, Matteo Carnaghi and Viviana Varese’s idea of sustainability, respect for  the local area, its products, those who produce them and for customers who wants to eat good, healthy  things. It is the Slow Food concept of “good, clean and fair”, which finds its application in organic and  biodynamic agriculture. The bistrot uses several Slow Food presidia and continues the collaboration started  by W Villadorata Country Restaurant with the social cooperative Si può fare in Noto, created to support and  promote the social integration and employment of disadvantaged people. 

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