Moving right along: we find ourselves in Catania, nestled at the foot of a gently simmering Etna. What are you going to do when faced with imminent eruption? You go out to eat, of course!

So after a day tramping around the Duomo and creeping through the tunnels of the Achillean Baths, perspiring discreetly and stopping just to wolf down a granita or two, we seek dinner. Online guides suggest a street near the fish market, which has those suspended umbrellas so beloved of Instagrammers. I’m sceptical for this reason alone, but the menu at Tantikkia looks interesting and the young woman who greets us is charming, so we give it a go.

But let’s cut to the chase. For starters, which we generally share, Daniela chose bruschette slathered in stracciatella, with anchovy, raw red prawn, sun-ripened cherry tomato, basil leaf and capers. The bread is slightly warm and very light. In Daniela’s words, this dish was “a flavour bomb.” To go with your dry, dry Campari spritz, you’re getting that milky texture, sweet and slightly salty with the crunch of the bread — and swimming within that, a salty anchovy touch here, a caper’s sharp tang, a prawn’s gently assertive fishiness. Molto bene!

As for me, it just had to be the intriguingly named insalata liquida — ‘liquid salad’: a soup of courgette greens, with little islands of stracciatella, flotsam of raw red shrimp, jetsam of anchovies (we’re talking tiny squares), Amberjack swimmers, all sown with floating spherical croutons of toasted cous-cous. In the mouth, it was a little like the bruschiette, but instead of bread, the cool, slightly herby liquid trickled the various flavourful surprises to the palate’s far corners, like the ‘concordia discors’ of a Capability Brown garden. (Look, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from TV chefs, you have to be a bit purple with your prose when talking food.)

Now, while you take a break from that florid description, let me digress just uno momento here to note that photographing food so that it looks warm, succulent and appetising is an art, better practised in a studio with the appropriate lighting set-up and so forth. That said, the humble smartphone with all its electronic trickery doesn’t do too bad a job — but please be kind. These pics are hastily snapped during animated conversation and enthusiastic chewing, and can never give you the real taste and fagrance of the food.

Anyway, onward we go. In an excess of adventurousness, I have put it all out there with a fillet of Dentice, or Dentex — a similar beast to Red Snapper in that it’s a firm-fleshed, mild-flavoured, white marine fish that can be cooked in similar ways: grilled, baked whole, roasted, or pan-fried. Mine’s ably supported by clams, mussels, tomato, capers, leek, red peppers and parsley.

You’ll note the similarities to the accompaniments to the squid I had a few days ago, which is to be expected, as we’re fishing in the same sea. Here, though, the Dentex has a mild, slightly sweet flavour, complemented by the peppers, with the more intense shellfish and piquant capers providing the high notes.

By the way, by this point we’ve moved on from spritzes to a typical Etna white wine: dry and crisp, with a touch of acidity, and both herbal and mineral overtones which, of course, goes superbly with seafood, especially served icy cold. For her main, Daniela goes one up on me with Mackerel a beccafico: a traditional dish named after the way wealthy Sicilians prepared small birds like the Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), fattened up on figs and their tiny corpses stuffed for the oven.

Here, the fillets of mackerel are rolled around a core of breadcrumbs, pine nuts, raisins, parsley, anchovies, and lemon. That’s them at the top left of D’s skilful photo. With the mackerel’s strong, meaty foundation, this stuffing creates a mid-structure of more nuanced earth and herb themes, cut through with a slight tang of lemon. And those pickled red onions overlay all with a sweetish savour. As D, daughter of a chef, says, “it’s earthy — sea meets shore: the shredded fresh salad leaves perfectly accompany the sweet salty mackerel.” Those veggies (not to mention wine grapes) sure gain a unique flavour in the fertile volcanic soils hereabouts. Subtle is the word here again, with the lightest suggestion of each constituent insinuating itself across the piece.

What you see above is our dessert. We really shouldn’t have, but then we did, so let’s all deal with it. This is dolce bosco, a festival of flavour and texture. We’re talking little cylinders of white chocolate cream and lemon cream, studded with tiny meringues, dusted with cocoa crumble, almonds, pistachios and Muscovado sugar, and topped off with mint leaves and fresh berries. As a vacuous influencer might say, OMG!!! That’s some concentrated sweet and zesty stuff right there. One’s enough for both of us.

At this point we ask our patient and courteous server to relay our best compliments to the chef, and she points across the alley to a man who has been sitting meditatively at a table with a glass of something the entire time. “Quello è lo chef,” she says. It is he — one Angelo Rapisarda, who takes in our fumbling thanks graciously. And so we pet the restaurant cat — a tough-looking tabby called Gigi — and watch as a local nonna questions the chef closely on how he prepares his food and where he gets his ingredients from. The place has filled up now, night has fallen, and if Etna decides to go pop, at least we’ll be bloody well fed.