Posted by Alexander Geyelin on Thursday, June 1, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

The night before the free weekend began, a group of ten of us went to a small restaurant in the heart of Cefalu called La Brace. One of us looked it up beforehand and read that it is one of the better restaurants in town, but is usually not very crowded or publicized due to its very small size and somewhat hidden location. To me, the most impressive thing about the restaurant is that it is operated solely by a mother and her son. The mother cooks everything and her son, David, does everything else – greeting, busing, bartending, and whatever else is needed. There are no other employees, but they still somehow served our party of ten seamlessly and without any apparent difficulty.

For the first course, most of us got one of two pastas that David recommended as the most popular dishes there – both were rigatoni, with the first cooked in a spicy, creamy tomato sauce and the second in a sausage and fennel sauce. I ordered the first one but had a bit of both, and they were easily two of the best things I’ve had over the past month. For the second course everyone mostly ordered different things, such as meatballs, swordfish, or chicken. Matt and I each ordered a beef filet with bacon, which was also one of the better main courses I’ve had here. And again, even with ten of us ordering very different things, David and his mom served us all at the same time and with no mistakes. Everybody loved their food, and loved the restaurant’s atmosphere and experience.

La Brace stands out from the other restaurants we have been to here in its scale and its intimacy; it is increasingly rare to see such a small family restaurant achieve consistent success and stay competitive and relevant in a tourist-oriented town filled with dozens of other larger restaurants. For example, back home, small family-owned businesses seem to close all the time only to be replaced by a larger, more generic options. We asked David after dinner how they do it by themselves as well as how they keep up, and he said that while operating the restaurant by themselves can be difficult, they simply have never had trouble attracting business. It is more difficult to imagine such a tiny and limited restaurant thriving to this level in one of the main tourist towns back in the U.S., as these family restaurants seem to be increasingly victimized by larger and more financially resourced businesses. Regardless, it was one of the better meals we have had on this trip, and most of us agreed that is was easily our favorite restaurant that we’ve been to.

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