Zash Country Boutique Hotel

Since 2014 at the pass

Listening comes first for Giuseppe Raciti, chef at Zash Country Boutique Hotel in Riposto, before a plate leaves the pass. His own description of the work begins with people: “I love being with people and listen: each one of us has something to communicate.” At Zash, in Archi, Riposto, that habit has held since 2014, when Raciti took the chef’s station at the hotel between the coast and Etna. The earlier line is clear enough to matter. He worked as Chef de Partie with the Santin chef team, then as a member of Massimo Mantarro’s team at Principe Cerami in Taormina, before making this Sicilian house his own kitchen. The restaurant holds a Michelin star awarded in 2019, but the more useful reading of Raciti’s tenure is its length at one address. He has had time to let the room, the land, and the guests press back on the cooking. He says he likes “to learn and to confront myself with different cultures from mine.” That sentence explains a great deal about the discipline here.

A Sicilian kitchen with a wide ear

The restaurant names its cooking Creative Sicilian, a phrase that can flatten the work unless it is kept close to the bench. Raciti’s known signature, Capasanta in Autunno, gives the clearer clue: a scallop dish set in autumn, not as a decorative season but as a framework for temperature, sweetness, and restraint. What can be said is that Raciti’s program is built from encounter rather than repetition. His kitchen does not appear to treat Sicily as a closed language. The training at Principe Cerami in Taormina gave him time inside a high-level hotel restaurant structure; Zash gives him a quieter field, with citrus country, volcanic view, and resort service meeting at the same pass. The courses arrive in sequence, and the dinner keeps moving. In that movement, the chef’s task is not volume. It is calibration: how much place to leave on the plate, how much conversation to allow from outside it.

The room under Etna

The room works inside a country hotel whose grounds pull attention outward. Guests write of large rooms looking straight at Etna, of the pool area, of calm, of a design that stays warm rather than theatrical. That matters for the restaurant because Raciti’s plates arrive in a house where the volcano is not a backdrop invented for dinner. It is part of the day’s light. The pass has to answer that without becoming scenic. Zash also carries the mixed pressures of a hotel: breakfast, welcome, spa, pool, rooms, arrivals, departures. The restaurant sits among those rhythms, and the kitchen still has to hold its line. Raciti’s work gains its tension there, in the difference between resort ease and kitchen discipline. The guest may come from the pool or the road up through Riposto; the plate still asks for attention.

What remains on the station

Raciti is still in post, and the continuity is the point to keep in view. Since 2014, the chef has been able to test a personal language in the same house, with the same Etna-facing context and the same need to make Sicilian cooking listen outward. If the next plate changes, it will still pass through the same question Raciti has already put on the table: who is speaking, and what should the kitchen hear before Capasanta in Autunno leaves the pass?