MEC, the Restaurant-Museum in the heart of Palermo
Opened in Palermo on January 31, 2020, The MEC Museum (acronym for Meet Eat & Connect) is the first museum of the IT Revolution in Sicily entirely dedicated to the Apple universe. The headquarters is Palazzo Castrone Santa Ninfa, a sixteenth-century noble palace, and houses about 200 computer antiques, including the Lisa, the Next Cube but above all what its owner defines as the “Holy Grail” of the Computer Revolution: the Apple-1, the first computer created by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in 1976. All pieces owned by the Palermo architect and entrepreneur Giuseppe Forello, as well as founder of MEC, which boasts a collection of about four thousand pieces, one of the most complete in the world.
Forello, who has always been passionate about computer science, is today one of the largest collectors of Apple pieces. Inside the museum, various prototypes are also exhibited, some of which have never been released on the market, unpublished photos of Steve Jobs, memorabilia including puppets, slides, vinyls, magazines. MEC is also a restaurant, or rather as his founder says “it is a museum that integrates with a restaurant and a restaurant that is also a museum”. In fact, in the evening, it turns into a fine dining restaurant, whose peculiarity, which makes it unique of its kind, is to dine inside the exhibition halls surrounded by display cases containing
very rare Apple IT pieces, in a suggestive atmosphere, in the heart of the historic center of Palermo and with a breathtaking view of the Cathedral. In June 2021 MEC was reported as one of the best restaurants in the area by the L’Espresso Guide dedicated to restaurants and wines of Italy 2021, which awarded him 2 Hats; symbol that distinguishes the best clubs of the peninsula; and in the summer of 2022 in the Michelin 2022 Guide in the online section dedicated to recommended restaurants, winning the most prestigious culinary guide in the world for “The renewed high-tech setting of Palazzo Castrone, the subtle but never exaggerated flavors of the executive chef Carmelo Trentacosti, the refinement of his dishes and the modern imprint “. In November 2022 the
restaurant obtained the coveted Michelin star. Executive Chef of the MEC is Carmelo Trentacosti.
Since its inception, MEC has been conceived as a creative and innovative hub, where the combination of art, technology, innovation and food is the true fulcrum of everything. In addition to the seven rooms of the museum, where the 8 thematic areas (Innovation, Pirates, Seed and fruit, Apple Store, Prototypes, Pixar, Temple and Competition) unfold, retracing the life of the founder of Apple and the evolution of his products from 1976 to present, the structure has a literary café that functions as a coworking space for both students and professionals; but also as a cultural exchange center where exhibitions, presentations, seminars, workshops, meetings with already known or emerging authors and artists take place, in a continuous exchange of connections and synergies that always have at the center and as a reference theme the computer science and technology.
