The Edit
Twice this week the collection gained a restaurant that cannot shop anywhere. Signum sits above Santa Marina on Salina, in the Aeolian Islands off Sicily. Fradis Minoris stands out on the Laguna di Nora, at the southern tip of Sardinia, with the Roman ruins of ancient Nora for a neighbour. Different seas, different kitchens, the same stubborn idea underneath both.
At Signum, Martina Caruso works the catch that the island's small boats bring in, and leans on the fish other kitchens leave behind, the moray eel and the oily blue fish that Salina has always eaten. The herbs come off the hillsides. The vegetables come from a patch her father keeps. Since 2020 the restaurant has also made its own wine from vines across the island. She was among the youngest Italian chefs to win a star the year she got hers, in 2016, and the kitchen now carries a Michelin Green Star for the way it sources.
An island draws a hard line around a kitchen. You cook what the boat landed and what the garden grew, or you do not cook at all.
Fradis Minoris makes the same bargain with a lagoon. Francesco Stara has run it since 2020 on a single tasting menu built from what the Nora water gives up, with vegetables from smallholders in the Campidano plain behind it. Little leaves the kitchen as waste. Skin, bones and the parts most cooks bin become garum and sauce. It too holds a star and a Green Star, and in 2024 Stara opened FradisLab next door to push the method further.
The Green Star is Michelin's newer mark, given since 2020 for how a restaurant treats its supply chain and its waste rather than for what reaches the plate. On a mainland menu it can read as a policy, a set of choices a kitchen could reverse next season. On a small island or a closed lagoon it reads as the plain truth of the address. There is no large market to drive to, no winter import to fall back on. The constraint writes the menu, and the best of these kitchens make that constraint taste like plenty.
Both are in the collection for the same reason, and it is not the stars, real as those are. It is the distance between the water and the table. On Salina and on the Nora lagoon that distance is short enough to walk, and it shapes the cooking every service.
The wild herbs gathered on Salina and the vegetables from the vegetable patch, tended by my father, cover almost all our kitchen needs during the summer months.
Martina Caruso, chef, Signum (Michelin Guide)
