Best Restaurants in Trapani, Sicily april 26, 2022 – Posted in: Italy, Travel – Tags: Food, Holiday, Italy, Restaurants, Reviews, Sicily, Trapani, Travel

How to find the great restaurants in Trapani

Trapani is located in western Sicily with the Tyrrhenian Sea on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other, and it is a city for you who love seafood. Most restaurants in Trapani have at least the very local dishes on the menu –  Busiate pasta, couscous alla trapanese and tonnare – which are just some of the things you should eat when you are in Trapani.

Most restaurants are located in the old town, especially on and around the main shopping street Corso Vittorio Emanuele. If you don’t know where to go out, you can always find a good meal here. However, the new town, where the locals live, also offers excellent restaurants. You can read about it all here, from a week where we tried to eat our way through Trapani. And no, we didn’t succeed because there is simply so much good food everywhere! Below you will also find our tips for the best bars in Trapani.

A guide to meal times in Trapani

Before we move on to telling you about the restaurants in Trapani, it is important to get the meal times in place. Most breakfast cafes (and there are many!) opens at 8-9 am. Lunch is eaten between 12 and 2 pm, and dinner from 8 pm and on. It makes good sense in a city that is very hot in the summer and where people stay in the shade from lunch until late in the afternoon.

If you get hungry in the middle of the day, do as the locals: find a bakery and enjoy a cake with a cup of coffee. Or sit down at one of the city’s countless bars and order an Aperol Spritz. For your drink, you are often served a wealth of snacks and at least chips and a bowl of nuts.

The locals often eat out and it can be hard to get a table if you arrive at the same time. So, if there’s a restaurant that you really want to eat at, do book a table, both for lunch and dinner. Or do as we do: come when the restaurant opens, then you are almost always sure to get a seat.

What does it cost to eat in Trapani?

The price level in the city is like in Rome, and it is not low-cost to go to a restaurant as in Spain. We were two adults who, with a shared starter, two main courses, dessert and two glasses of local wine, payed from between €40 to €85 at the various restaurants we ate at. Street food like pizza and arancini, on the other hand, are inexpensive everywhere.

If you choose to sit at a table, there will be a coperto of €2-3 per. person added to your bill. It’s a standard price, which covers bread, salt and pepper, olive oil and tablecloth – and whatever else you need. The price does not cover water, which you will always be offered. And in such a hot city, just say yes and thank you, even if it will cost you a few euros. You can pay with cash at the restaurants, but most places accept credit cards.

About the recommendations for restaurants in Trapani

Finally, we would also like to tell you about what restaurants we usually go for – so you can decide if you want to follow our recommendations. We love to eat well and restaurant visits are usually a big part of our vacations. We don’t necessarily eat expensive, but always locally and with local ingredients. We are also always on the hunt for the new culinarial adventures and prefer to eat something we have never tasted before.

Usually we do a thorough research before heading to a new destination, especially to find all the good restaurants. The problem with Trapani is that very few articles have been written about the city as a travel destination and it was more than difficult to find restaurant recommendations.

We usually don’t use Tripadvisor because the reviews here are most often based on popularity, rather than quality. Without the usual sources to find good restaurants, however, it became a necessity. And as we found out, the reviews on Tripadvisor fit surprisingly well here in Trapani.

The restaurants you can read about here were the ones we had time to eat at. However, there are many other great restaurants in town! If we have to say anything in general about the food in Trapani, it is that there are no bad restaurants here, and many are really, really good!

6 great restaurants in Trapani

Slo Restaurant

As mentioned, many of the city’s great restaurants are located on the main shopping street Corso Vittorio Emanuele. If you take a stroll down the street, you will definitely stop by Slo Restaurant, which sends the smell of freshly baked pizzas all over the street. You can get your pizza to go, but you can also enjoy it in the restaurant right next door. Many of the delicious Trapanes specialties are also served here.

Antichi Sapori

Restaurant Antichi Sapori is located in the old town, almost right by the harbor. Here was packed with locals when we came by on a Tuesday night and we understand that well! The restaurant offers all the classic delicacies of Trapani: busiate, mussels, squid and fish couscous. The portions were large and the food tasty, so the dessert came to consist exclusively of a glass of the local Marsala wine.

Tastasioni di Gusto

Tentazioni di Gusto is located in a small side street close to the shopping zone in the old town. We ate really good food in Trapani, but at the restaurant here we got one of the very best meals of the trip. The price reflects that too, but the place is worth every cent. We chose fish couscous (pictured above) and lobster ravioli for the main course, and the dark bread was used to catch the very last of the fish stock and lobster bisque. For dessert we had a pistachio tiramisu and a cannolo.

Best pizza in Trapani

Trapani is filled with pizzerias offering take-away pizza. On the other hand, it’s a bit harder to find a restaurant where you can sit down and eat your pizza with a knife and fork. We were therefore looking forward to a visit to Pizza Gourmet in the new town, which, according to the reviews we could find, was to be the city’s best pizza restaurant. We’ll probably learn it some day, booking a table, because the restaurant was packed with locals, and we had to find another place.

Luckily we had a plan B, the Pizzeria La Tavernetta, which is a 10 minute walk away. Here we got two really good pizzas, one with mushrooms and ham and one with fresh tomatoes and anchovies. It can only be recommended!

La Champagnotta

La Champagnotta in the new district was also one of the places we eould like to give our thumbs up to. The small wine bar is open for both lunch and in the evening, and we had a wonderful lunch here. Tuna and the catch of it still play a big role in Trapani, and tonnare, the big tuna, is also one of the things you should eat when you are in town. We ordered a tuna board with tuna in six different ways and there were both smoked tuna, salty tuna eggs and slices of tuna carpaccio.

Vintage Restaurant

On the way through the new town, we had passed Vintage Restaurant several times, and from the outside it looked very good. However, the reviews of it were a bit mixed, not about the food, but about the quality of the service. Several locals and tourists had written about long waits and forgotten dishes, but the food looked so delicious that we decided to give the restaurant a try.

And we were not disappointed! Both food and reviews lived up to expectations. Because yes, after the starter we were just forgotten too – but the food was so good that we can’t not recommend the restaurant anyway. Among other things, we tried a Cannolo Salmone, a fried cannolo with salmon, and their Busiata Salsiccia, the Trapanese pasta with spicy sausage and small olives.

The best bars in Trapani

The meals always ends well with a drink, and Trapani has many bars throughout. They are concentrated around the major shopping streets Corso Vittorio Emanuele and Via Roma, while the younger audience party in Via Guiseppe Garibaldi and Via della Cuba. Among other things, we can recommend Jabir for the exciting and innovative cocktails, where we tried a “Terra” with Marsala wine and a hot punch with lots of cinnamon.

If you are looking for craft beer, visit the bar Il Barbagianni, which has a large selection of local beer from Trapani and the rest of Sicily. And finally there is the wine – because we mustn’t forget the fantastic Sicilian wine, so full of flavor. The small wine bar  Garibaldi 58 Bar is here to be recommended here for the good selection of both wine and delicious cocktails.

More tips for your holiday in Trapani

Find a great hotel in Trapani

There are three areas you can choose to stay in when you visit Trapani: the old town, the new town and then in the medieval town of Erice. The old town is where it all happens with the shopping street Corso Vittorio Emanuele as a lively center. The new district is where the locals live in the smaller roads going in all directions from the long shopping street. Here you are also close to the best beaches. Erice is located on a mountain, making you dependent on the cable car, but in return yo have an amazing view over Trapani and the Egadi Islands.

On Booking.com you can see the hotels and holiday apartments in Trapani, and below you can also read our recommendations for Trapani. Please do your own search on Booking.com for a good hotel in Trapani right here:

Booking.com

Recommendations for an apartment and a hotel in Trapani

Being in Trapani for a week, whe had the time to have both a city break and a beach holiday at our time in Trapani. The first days we stayed in an apartment in the center of the old town right by Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The restaurants, harbor and sights were right below our window, and it was nice to have your own kitchen.

During the week we moved to the relatively new and really nice beach hotel Punta Tipa, where the photo is from. Trapani is not (yet) patched up with beach hotels, and in fact Punta Tipa is one of the only ones. It is located just before the best beach in Trapani (at the university) and with the most beautiful view over the city.

From the hotel there are about 10 minutes walk up to the new town and 30 minutes to Torre dell’Orologio in the old town. Trapani is an expensive city to park in, with prices from 1 euro per hour inside the city center, but Punta Tipa is with its free parking spaces a good hotel for you who is renting a car and want to use Trapani as a base to get out and see a lot of sights in the area. Read more about the hotel by clicking on the links or photo.

See more great hotel in Trapani on Booking.com – click here!