Although the country's top restaurant features a meat-free tasting menu, Italian cuisine isn't one that's typically associated with plant-based eating — but the more you explore, the more you find. With panelle, however, you won't have to look as far as the streets of Palermo, Sicily, where the chickpea fritters are served hot, fried, and crisp on what's known as a panino, or an Italian sandwich made on a small loaf of bread.

Drizzled with a hit of fresh lemon and sprinkled with fresh, green herbs, panelle is about as simple as it gets, showcasing that Italian cuisine is about much more than meat and cheese. At its core, Italian cuisine, and Mediterranean-Italian cuisine especially, is one that embraces seasonal, low-cost, local ingredients in dishes that sometimes, as in the case of panelle, turn out also to be plant-based.