Meet Linda Sarris, Palermo-Based Travel Consultant and Private Chef
Issue #48
Sicily gets under your skin. From big bustling cities like the capital of Palermo to the pristine beaches, baroque villages, and vineyards in the countryside, Italy’s largest island has a magnetic pull that tends to keep people hooked. It certainly had that effect on Linda Sarris, a classically trained chef who moved from New York City to Palermo in 2018.
I actually met Linda years ago, in what feels like another lifetime, when I took her pasta-making class at the Brooklyn Kitchen and wrote about it for Brooklyn Magazine. We lost touch, but recently reconnected. While Linda still works as a private chef on creative retreats and sailing trips, she has pivoted to focus more on the tourism industry.
Through her brand, the Cheeky Chef, she offers private market tours in Palermo, organizes immersive small group trips in Sicily throughout the year, and helps people plan their holidays on the island. She also co-authored Moon’s Southern Italy guidebook and wrote a new Sicily guidebook for Moon, which is coming out in March 2024. When it comes to traveling around Sicily—and especially Palermo—she’s the person you want to know. So I’m thrilled to share her insights as part of my series of interviews with creatives and entrepreneurs in Italy.
When did you first visit Palermo and why did you decide to move there?
I first came to Sicily in 2011 to work with Fabrizia Lanza at the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School, which is right in the middle of Sicily, halfway between Palermo and Catania. I got a scholarship through a women’s chef organization to work with her for a few months and just completely fell in love with Sicily.
I used to come to Palermo every once in a while when I worked on the farm to get a little city life and so I met some friends here. Eventually, when I wanted to move here, I was coming from New York City and Palermo was the easy choice. I had to be in a city, I wasn’t gonna live in a little village, and there’s just so much to offer here, so I visited a lot over the years while I was still living in New York. I’d come a few months a year and then I moved here full time in 2018.
I know that you’re only doing the private chef thing a few months out of the year, but I’m curious to learn a little more about that. Can you tell me more?
I went to the French Culinary Institute in New York City, which actually doesn’t exist anymore. And then I got a scholarship in Sicily, so I came here right after school. Then I went back to New York and was private cheffing there for five or six years. Then when I came here, there really isn't a private cheffing industry and the funny thing is Italians don't really want an American to be their chef.
The level of home cooking is so high because everyone loves to eat in Italy, everyone cooks fairly well—in the south even more so. They tend to live with their families longer than we do in the U.S., so everyone has a mom to cook, everyone is pretty good at cooking, so they don’t need a private chef. So I just reinvented myself a little and went more into food and wine tourism because I found that I can learn about the food and I can be the in between for the locals and the tourists and still cook a little bit, but I think if I wanted to just be doing catering and private cheffing here it wouldn’t last very long.
How has living in Sicily changed the way you cook?
I think it’s a lot more ingredient driven compared to the French cooking that I studied. French cooking is all about technique and what you can do with the products. Here the products are so amazing, you try to do as little as possible to put them together well but still let the ingredients shine.
I’m living in Ballarò, which is the neighborhood that has the big outdoor market in Palermo. I basically just open my door and I’m in the biggest food market in the city, so I buy everything that’s grown in Sicily. What I love is that the products here change seasonally and actually quite quickly. Like today for example, I was out of town for three days and there’s totally different things from what we had last week. New fruits are coming in, stone fruits, and today I saw something I love that’s kind of a mix between an apricot and an apple. It’s a little fruit called sbergie.
The food changes really fast so you kind of adapt. You’re cooking seasonally without it being a trend, but because that’s what we have. I’m eating fresher things and I’m shopping often because I’m only buying a few things at a time.
When I was in Sicily, in Palermo specifically, I encountered tenerumi for the first time, which I had never seen before.
Exactly, every region has their specialties, but I do tours in the market and that’s what I tell people. These are things that you won’t see anywhere else, like the really long zucchini—like a meter long—and the tenerumi greens that come with it, so in summer we do recipes with that. And then things change, and we do artichokes and wild fennel and fava beans in the spring. So the recipes totally change based on the season.
What are your favorite things to cook?
I love cooking fish and I’ve kind of always been that way since I started cooking professionally. My family is Greek-American, I went to a French cooking school, and then I came straight to Sicily, and did some other cooking in Italy but mostly Sicily, and so it’s very Mediterranean. It’s fresh ingredients, seafood, veggies, beans, lots of olive oil and seasonal stuff.
Have you learned to gut the fish yourself or do you have the fishmonger do it?
Oh my god yes, I love doing stuff like that myself. I got a job at Eataly before, when I was living in New York after the very first time I worked in Sicily. And I met this woman in Sicily and I told her I got this job at Eataly and she was like, “What are you doing? Are you a fishmonger?” and I was like, “Yeah actually, how would you know that?” And she said, “Cause I’ve never seen anyone so happy to clean a calamari.”
So I always like cooking fish. In these crazy fish markets in Catania and Palermo they have all this stuff I’d never seen before, and the best way to learn to cook fish is to do every step of the process, so I clean everything and filet things. And when I work on a boat in the summer—I do these sailing trips where I’m a private chef—if we catch something, it’s the best day of the week because I’m fileting a fish and serving it that same night.
Before I moved to Rome, I had never bought a whole fish and cooked it in the oven and then used the head and the bones to make broth. So for me, there was a big change in terms of adapting to that more holistic way of cooking, and I’m still learning, but I think it’s an interesting cultural difference.
Sicilian food is built on the fact that you never waste anything, so many of our recipes are using leftovers or old bread or using bread in place of things because it was cheap and it was filler. So if you could afford to have a fish or an animal, absolutely nothing would be wasted. And I think everything is so super fresh, why not be able to use every part of it?
So for people who are visiting Sicily, what are the culinary specialties that they should try?
I like that people try Sicilian food when they’re here. That's what I focus on teaching people in my market tours. Try the dishes from here, don’t order carbonara from a restaurant in Palermo because it’s going to be terrible and you’re missing out on all these dishes that we’re good at.
So everything changes with the seasons, but pasta con le sarde is pasta with sardines and wild fennel, and every family cooks it a little differently, but you can put saffron, pine nuts, and raisins, and that’s a very traditional thing from here. Caponata, that’s our sweet and sour eggplant salad with capers and onions and eggplant in sweet and sour sauce.
All the desserts. We have so much ricotta, so there’s ricotta everywhere. Everybody knows cannoli, but there are so many other desserts that use ricotta. We have little fried ravioli and tons of cakes, like cassata is our big queen cake of Sicily. So sponge cake, marzipan, ricotta cream, candied fruit.
There’s so much—so many fried things. There’s street food in Palermo that costs so little and fills you up and tastes great.
Arancine, sfincione...
Panelle, the chickpea fritter. So there’s things that were born here and now have taken off and you see in other places. Like sfincione and panelle were born in Palermo, but you see them all over Sicily now.
And there are some recipes from other parts of Sicily, right? When we went to San Vito lo Capo, which is near Trapani, we ate pesto trapanese there and couscous.
Yeah, all of Italy has regional cuisine, so things change with the region, but even within the region, things change province to province or town to town. Trapani is farther west than Palermo, so they have a little bit more of those African and Arab roots, so you’ll get couscous there, whereas you wouldn’t get it in any other parts of Italy or Sicily.
There’s dishes from each area, like Catania is famous for pasta alla norma with fried eggplants and ricotta salata on top. That side of Italy is much better for granita. Catania, Messina are famous for granita even though you can get granita anywhere now.
And it depends on what grows where you are. On the whole southern coast and southeast, they grow tons of almonds. So that’s why Noto is so famous for almonds, because they grow them there so everything has almonds in it. Or when you go to Pantelleria, everything has capers in it. Those are their specialties.
I remember my first trip to Sicily was with friends, for their big Sicilian wedding in Acireale. The first time going down to the bar in the morning for breakfast of granita and brioche with espresso, it was mind-blowing.
Oh my god, yeah. It’s so good. I had a boyfriend from Acireale and they’re very proud of their granita and brioche there. So every part of the island has its specialties. In Messina, they do these little skewered meat rolls. All the islands have their own dishes. Palermo and Catania have more of the street food thing because those are the big cities. And if you live on the coast, you eat seafood, but if you live in the middle, you really don’t. The cuisine is not fish based. It’s full of vegetables, beans, mushrooms, wild greens, and pork. It’s very different even just an hour from here.
And there’s some great wine in Sicily, right?
There is! They’ve always made a lot of wine here. I won’t say great wine because it used to be shipped north to be mixed and blended with other wines. Now they make really great wines here and depending on where you are, they do different kinds of wine. The west is more specialized in white wines and the east is more red, but then there’s some that cross over. And then we have one DOCG wine from near Ragusa—there’s only one in all of Sicily. And then on the island of Pantelleria, which I love—I go there all the time—they make passito, which is the dessert wine that’s made with raisins. We have Marsala... There’s lots of things from here.
So we started talking about the market tours, but I would love to hear more about the programs that you have with travelers who are visiting Sicily.
I do a lot of things because I like the variety. So I do the market tours in Palermo in the mornings. I only do private groups, so they’re usually small, like two to four people, all year round. Then in the spring I co-host a program with Peggy Markel, who’s a culinary travel designer and she’s kind of the OG. She started doing food tours in Italy and other parts of the world a long time ago. She’s been in business for over 30 years. So I work with her on a trip in Sicily in May, a weeklong trip across Sicily. Then I do sailing in summer. We go to the Aeolian Islands and I organize the whole program. I’m their guide and host and chef. So I cook on the boat for small groups in summertime.
And I cook for retreats when they come up. That’s always been the biggest part of cooking that I’ve held onto: the sailing trips and retreats. I started out doing retreats for musicians and producers who do something called a writing camp. They get all these artists together to write songs, so I live in a villa with them and I feed them for a month. And from there, I went to yoga retreats and artist residences, so anytime people are doing something like a retreat as a group, some kind of creative thing or wellness, I go along and I feed them while they do their thing. And I have a wine tour in October in Pantelleria.
That's Vino Volcanico?
Yeah, I did it once and it ended up being all women and only one man came. And we thought, this could’ve been really nice if it was just a girls’ trip, so the second year I made it ladies only and it was even better, so now I’m keeping it that way. So my October trip is like a ladies’ wine trip, it’s five days in October in Pantelleria. We visit different winemakers everyday, we do island excursions, we swim in the hot springs, we go to the caper museum, and we stay in these traditional dammusi houses overlooking the sea. It’s super beautiful. We all live together and I cook for them.
And then I just started a new program on Mount Etna, so I’m doing a Vino Volcanico program in May next year and that one’s going to be open to everyone. That way I can do two different wine programs every year: one on Etna and one on Pantelleria.
And this summer you did the first collaboration with Stellavision. How did that go?
It went super well. We did our first collaboration in the Aeolian Islands in June and we’re doing another one at the end of September, which will close out the summer season because September is still absolutely gorgeous in Sicily. So we’re hoping to do June and September next year too. And it’s just been fun.
I like collaborating with other people like Peggy and the trip with Zoe. I tend to work with a lot of women. Because I run my own business and I work alone, I look for that collaboration because it’s nice to work on something together, share the responsibility, share the expertise, and when you can have two hosts instead of one, it’s even better for the guests.
I have this island obsession I guess, even though I’m on Sicily and it’s already an island. I love the Aeolian Islands and Pantelleria. Every time I go, I wanna stay longer. I wanna go back right away. I can’t wait til next year.
I definitely wanna visit some of the satellite islands because my husband and I road tripped around Sicily for two weeks and I’ve been to Sicily like three other times, but I’ve never been to the Aeolian Islands or Pantelleria.
They’re all so different too, which is great because then you wanna just keep coming back and see another one. Even just Sicily, you can’t see it all on one trip. So people that understand it and like it get hooked and then they wanna come back again.
And you are also writing guidebooks about Sicily.
Yeah, I wrote some articles for different people. I wrote an article in Italian for Food & Wine Italia. I just wrote an article on Palermo restaurants for the Infatuation. Italy Segreta, I did some things about Sicily for them. And in 2020, I got the contract to write the Southern Italy guidebook with Moon Guides, so I was super lucky because I got this big book deal during the pandemic when everything else was canceled.
Because I move around a lot and I freelance and do different things, I would have never had the time to sit down and write any kind of book, so I wrote the first book during the first year and a half of Covid, which ended up being a good project for me. And then it came out as soon as people were allowed to travel here again. So I’m working on a second one now that’s just about Sicily, but it’s with the same publisher. It’s a travel guidebook, so it’s hotels, restaurants, historical sites, what to do in each city, recommendations for beaches and tours.
Were those books both from scratch? Because that’s a massive undertaking.
Yeah, it’s a really hard thing to do. I think writing about travel during Covid was hard because you couldn’t travel. It’s also a lot of things to cover. I’m a soon-to-be food and wine expert. I don't know anything about historical sites or the history of these cities. I had to learn all these things to be able to write a proper introduction of Sicily in general or each city. So there was so much to learn in order to do it justice.
The first book, Southern Italy, I wrote about Sicily and Puglia mostly, so I was taking research trips to Puglia every time that lockdown opened up. You don’t get paid a lot for guidebooks and you wanna go and visit everything to be able to recommend it, but you can’t stay in every hotel, you can’t eat at every restaurant, so you rely on research and talking to other people and you do the best you can with onsite scouting. I’m dreaming of the day that I can do the update because doing the book from scratch was enormous.
And you’re also responsible for curating it, right? If you’re working on a book like that from scratch, you have to decide which cities or towns even make it into the book, right?
Oh yeah, and part of that too is working with the editor, who has to make some of those calls, but then as the local expert, I have to say, “No, that place is not really worth it, so I would cut that, but I would add this place in, because you forgot that and it’s absolutely amazing.” So it’s definitely in my hands to curate what makes it in and what doesn’t, even in terms of cities. A whole city could get cut out because we didn’t have space for it.
The southern Italy book is very slim, like if you’re coming to Sicily for three days, what do you have to do? But in the new Sicily book I added in so many more places, because there’s so much more to explore if Sicily is your only focus. So to me it was important that if I had a Sicily book it had as much of Sicily as possible in it.
So aside from Palermo, what are your top three places that someone visiting Sicily has to visit?
Ortigia in Siracusa is absolutely gorgeous. There’s history, there’s food, there’s a market, there’s the beach. It's easy to explore without a car and people watch. I absolutely love Ortigia. I could go there a million times and not get sick of it.
I’m obsessed with Pantelleria, the island between Sicily and Tunisia. It’s really green and it’s great for swimming, but there’s no sand beach anywhere, so it’s a little bit more for the adventurous traveler. You rent a car, you explore on your own, it’s beautiful even in the off season. It's always been really popular with Italians just in summertime, but I do my tours in May and October and so you almost have the whole island to yourself. There are wineries to visit, they make great food, and the natural landscape is so different from what you see in other parts of Sicily.
And I like the southeast as a place to explore all in one go. You can go from Noto to Modica, Siracusa, Scicli, all these little towns in the southeast in one trip, so it’s easy to get around and everything is sort of close together. If it’s your very first trip to Sicily, I think that little corner of it is a good first step.
Can you share a few of your favorite places to eat in Palermo?
Corona Trattoria is one of my favorites. It’s a seafood trattoria run by a local family. My boyfriend has a restaurant, which doesn't always make it onto my top hits because I don’t want people to think I recommend it just because it’s his, but it’s called Osteria Alivàru and it’s not far from the botanical gardens, where you eat super well—home style Sicilian food—and it’s very affordable. So you get really good food and it’s not expensive. Aja Mola is another favorite of mine. It’s another fish place near Vucciria. And just go to the markets and eat street food.
Ballarò?
Ballarò forever. Ballarò is amazing because it’s so loud and chaotic and beautiful and big, and so I think it’s a must see.
Further Reading
To learn more about Linda’s travel programs, check out her website and follow her on Instagram.
See more of Linda’s favorite restaurants and bars in Palermo in her guide for the Infatuation.
For Italy Segreta, Linda wrote a curated itinerary for a weekend in Palermo and a guide to Lipari, the largest of the Aeolian Islands.
Learn more about the Aeolian Islands in issue #45, a guest post by Zoe Shapiro, Linda’s collaborator on the Cheeky Sicilian Sailing Trip by Stellavision.
As I mentioned in the interview, my husband Marco and I road tripped around Sicily for two weeks for our honeymoon. You can read about that trip in my feature for Hemispheres.
You can see all the interviews in this series here.