The Una Palace Hotel, Catania Sicily

Got settled in the room and they had told us at the front desk that there was a roof top bar/restaurant, so we headed there first.  Beautiful spot with a great view of the city and mount Etna.  Very cool.  We ordered a bottle of Sicilian Nero d'Avola.  They had some nice things on the bar menu and we were about to order some food when the bar manager told us, don't order food, if you wait about 30 minutes it will be happy hour and they would be putting out a big spread that was free.  Even though we were tired we were not that tired and decided to drink our wine and wait. I'm not sure that that they understood the concept of happy hour the way that we do in the US.  In the US they put out a couple of decent things from 5:30 to 6:30 hoping to lure customers to stay for dinner.  at 7:30 they put out this tremendous spread of great Italian food, and I mean lots of it.  Salami, olives, pickled eggplant, piadine, lots of different foccacio, pizza squares, farinata (a chick pea fi), couscous, rice salad, cheeses, and these fantastic arrancine (rice ball) one with  a normal ragu but the show stopper was the one with Nero seppia ( black cuttle fish ink).  I didn't know what they were at first because they were almost black, but they were unbelievably good.  Crispy on the outside soft on the inside with slight not overpowering seafood flavor.  Fantastic!  You could eat all you want.  They called it Appertivo!  Maybe that's the difference but I'm sorry to say that Linda and I had the Appertivo every night for dinner, not because we were cheap but it was just so damn good, and we didn't have to over eat and we could just stumble down to our rooms.  Way too easy.  It  changed every night and Salvatore the manager we became fast friends with.  Once he found out that I was cento per cento Sicilan, we were great buddies.

They also had a really nice fine dinning restaurant in the same area.  I don't know how this didn't kill their regular restaurant business, but we saw a lot of people dinning in the restaurant

All the staff was very warm and extending, from the front desk, the people at the breakfast bar (which was wonderful) and of course to our good friend Salvatore.  We tried to speak only Italian whenever possible but they were very helpful to guest who only spoke english.

I will stay at the Una if I ever come back to Catania.  They were fantastic.