A Dinner in Palermo That United Tokyo, Chicago, Martigny, and the Roots of the Island

On Friday, October 24, 2025, at the Millesuoli restaurant in Palermo, a dinner became a story — a weave of cultures, visions, and languages bound by one common word: roots.

Around the table sat faces representing distant yet complementary worlds. Friends who are part of our story, and whom fate exceptionally brought together in Palermo, for one night.
From the United States, Michelle Durpetti, heir and managing partner of the historic Gene & Georgetti restaurant in Chicago, founded in 1941 — one of the temples of Italian dining in America, today carried forward with passion and a contemporary vision. We met and immediately connected two weeks ago at the Columbus in Chicago, again last week at the NIAF in Washington, and then once more in Palermo a few days ago. We joked about which city in the world should be our fourth meeting point. With her were her husband, Collin Pierson, a renowned Chicago photographer, and their friend Philippe Carvalho, filmmaker and founder of Mirar Media, a Chicago-based production studio creating documentaries and visual storytelling around the world.

From Japan came Aya Oguma, a master of kintsugi, the ancient art of repairing what is broken with gold. We met her last year during the Vespucci stopover and convinced her to join us in Palermo, along with her partner Shigeo Takeshita, fourth-generation head of Utsuwa Omusubi, Tokyo’s oldest company specializing in fine ceramics for haute cuisine.

And finally, from Switzerland, Cécille Giovanini and her partner. Cécille is an artist of Sicilian descent. Her story is different: she was drawn to Palermo by her roots, to contribute one of her works to the Book of Roots, which has its symbolic home at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo and has traveled the world with us. A project by the Fondazione Made in Sicily, it gathers artistic and emotional traces from all over the world.

In Palermo, there’s a word for a path that connects people and places: trazzera. So we asked Millesuoli, and chef Alessandro Gallo — an extraordinary rising star of Sicilian cuisine — to be our trazzera for the evening. With us were Giampiero Cannella, Deputy Mayor of Palermo, and the ever-present Domenico Boscia, who created live during the evening a new page for the Book of Roots.

This page, however, was not dedicated to a city, but to the place where we were: the Millesuoli restaurant — and through it, to all restaurants, as spaces of encounter and exchange.

During the evening, we talked about everything — food, roots, friendship, sharing — and imagined many future gatherings. But in the end, what we truly showed was how Palermo itself, and here we thank Deputy Mayor Giampiero Cannella for his meaningful and symbolic presence, is a great trazzera open to the world.

Sicily did not simply host; it welcomed.
It became a bridge — between those who cook and those who repair, between those who capture images and those who turn them into stories.
Michelle Durpetti brought the value of family tradition turned into cultural enterprise;
Aya Oguma, the delicacy of a gesture that restores dignity to a fracture;
Cécille Giovanini, the sense of belonging and return.

A Perfect Synthesis of the Made in Sicily Spirit

Culture, hospitality, art, and enterprise gathered around a single table in Palermo.
A dinner entitled Roots that managed to express far more than its name:
it showed that Sicily is not only a land of origin,
but a place that knows how to create connections, nurture ideas,
and turn every encounter into an act of love toward the world.

The Dinner Menu — Radici

We also love to share the menu from that night — a heartfelt creation by Chef Alessandro Gallo, presented with passion by Cristian Catalano, the soul of this unique and splendid venue in Palermo.

A journey designed as a sensory voyage through land, sea, and memory, with a surprising nod to Japan:

• Baked polenta stick with vanilla-flavored Jerusalem artichoke cream and purple potato chips
• Sesame wafer with baby lettuce, bluefin tuna, and green beans
• Black cod cube with cuttlefish ink, ginger jelly, and Sichuan pepper
• Chickpea cannolo with eggplant, almonds, mint, and tonburi — a rare and symbolic ingredient known as “the vegetable caviar of Japan,” a tribute to the encounter between two cultures (note: the tonburi was brought to Palermo by Aya, at the chef’s request)

Then followed:

• Slow-cooked eggplant with teriyaki sauce, bell pepper cream, and toasted almonds
• Spaghettoni with red mullet ragù, black lentils, and osmosis carrots
• Sole with sandwich bread, stracchino cheese, squid sauce, mussel cream, asparagus, and lumpfish roe
• Cassata with Bonajuto dark chocolate and seasonal candied fruit

Each dish told a fragment of dialogue between past and present,
between matter and soul, between Sicily and the world.