For over twenty years, Ciccio Sultano has led Duomo in Ragusa Ibla, awarded two Michelin stars since 2006. His cuisine, rooted in Sicily’s millennial history and culture, blends memory, research, and delicacy, making it a benchmark of Italian gastronomy.
Ciccio Sultano began his culinary journey at just thirteen, taking a part-time job in a pastry shop in Vittoria that soon turned into a seven-year apprenticeship. He then joined the staff of a local spaghetti house that achieved great success, encouraging him to dream of opening his own restaurant in Sicily.
Determined to refine his skills abroad, in 1995 he moved to Germany and, in 1997, to New York, where he joined the kitchens of restaurateur and television host Lidia Bastianich. Yet Sicily — with its abundance of produce and the generosity of its people — remained an irresistible call. In 2000 he returned to Ragusa and fulfilled his dream by opening Ristorante Duomo.
Recognition quickly followed: in 2004 he earned his first Michelin star, and in 2006, his second, which he still holds today. Study, passion, research, and composition define his gastronomic vision, rooted in the island’s complex history and reinterpreted with contemporary dynamism. As he himself says: “Sicily is the concentration of a millennial culture, of geological and gastronomic diversity grown in splendor, contradiction, and suffering. It transmits its history through dishes, where what seems unusual elsewhere — sweet and sour, bitter, sweet, and salty all together — for us is everyday life.”
Alongside Duomo, in 2015 he opened I Banchi, a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional trattoria. Three years later, he brought his cuisine beyond Sicily for the first time, launching Pastamara at the Ritz-Carlton in Vienna, on the famous Ringstrasse. In 2019 he inaugurated Cantieri Sultano, a multifunctional space next to Duomo dedicated to experimentation, masterclasses, and conviviality.
In 2021 he arrived in Rome with Giano, the restaurant inside Italy’s first W Hotel, offering a cuisine that combines Sicily’s peasant, monastic, aristocratic, and bourgeois traditions with contemporary influences. In July 2023, he expanded I Banchi to Palermo Airport, bringing his vision of Sicilian cuisine to an even wider audience.
Ciccio Sultano’s cooking moves between land and sea, between home memories and travels, between popular and high culture — always with a delicate touch that reflects deep roots and openness to change.
