Our restaurant’s fishmonger’s of reference is La Pescheria Da Silvio Costa, located on Ischia, which works with many local fishermen from Ischia Ponte and Lacco Ameno. There is always local fish available at this fishmonger’s.

As Il Saturnino is a small restaurant, it wouldn’t have been possible to go to each fisherman and take large quantities of one type of fish, as there would be a risk of it not being consumed, and of having to keep it refrigerated and no longer having truly fresh raw ingredients with which to cook.

Our restaurant has chosen this same fishmonger’s for more than 10 years. In the fishmonger’s everyone knows how Ciro, our chef, works – what he likes, and what he loves to work with. Even at four in the afternoon, they call us and say, for example, “Giovanni [a local fisherman] has brought in two trawl lines. What shall we do with them?” Obviously, we take both of them and we have the privilege of being among the first they will call, because we have mutual respect and are well regarded.

In short, we always have fresh fish available in our restaurant, even in August when the fishermen don’t go out to sea, or rather the few who do reserve their catch for private customers.

Nowadays we have the courage to tell our patrons that we have nothing to offer them, and we don’t work with farmed fish. All the fish used at Il Saturnino are locally-caught.

Silvio Costa always guarantees us particular locally-caught fish such as scorpion fish, forkbeard, and even more traditional fish such as gilthead bream, but always freshly caught.

A sort of collaboration with the fishmonger’s was also born. Once, Silvio called our chef and told him: “They’re going for pezzogna sea bream and they’re bringing in a load of horse mackerel. What shall we do?” At that point our chef went to the kitchen and created a special dish with the horse mackerel, which then became the most asked-for dish of the summer.