Bar Touring: The Genovese Family's Palermo Bar for Locals
In a single morning the counter here sees a police patrol, shop assistants from the street outside, mothers with children and grandmothers - and not one of them came in for a cocktail. In Italy the word bar means something different from what it does back home in Czechia: not a night spot where drinks get mixed, but a daytime stop you drop into several times a day, each time for something else - coffee in the morning, a hot meal at noon, a glass of something in the evening.
Bar Touring in Palermo is exactly that kind of place: a café, a pastry shop and a hot-food counter serving Italian cooking all in one, open from early morning until midnight and filled mostly with locals.
The Genovese Family on the Corner of Two Streets
The Genovese family opened Bar Touring in 1959 on a corner by the Villa Giulia park, a few steps from the sea, and their name is still on it - the company is still registered under it too. I mean the corner literally: some sources put the bar on Via Lincoln, others on Viale Alcide De Gasperi, and both are right - the building sits on the corner and the entrance can be described from either side. The name is the trickier part: nobody today can say for certain why their bar goes by the English word for travel. Milan's Touring Club Italiano would be the obvious candidate, except the only documented connection runs the other way - the club now lists the bar in its Palermo guide. In the late 1950s the name most likely just had to sound worldly.
From the Cornetto to the Arancina Bomba
The day at Touring runs in shifts. Mornings belong to the pastry counter: cornetti, small cakes and a coffee the locals drink standing up before a foreigner has even found a free chair. Around noon the display cases switch to tavola calda - a hot counter with calzone, panini and fried things. The house specialty is the arancina bomba: a fried rice ball of four hundred grams, twice the usual size, invented by the pastry chef Antonino Genovese and big enough to carry a whole lunch in one hand. And alongside all that the cases hold cannoli, cassata and ice cream - the sweet half of Sicily behind a single pane of glass.
Register First, Counter Second
Ordering has its own choreography in Italy, and busy bars are the strictest about it: you pay at the register first, and only with the receipt in hand do you go to the counter. If you don't know that, you end up in the wrong line and get sent back - no shame in it, just one extra lap. At Touring the system has one advantage: the register sits roughly in the middle of the long display cases, so you can order by pointing, without a single word of Italian. There are few seats and nobody minds - this is a ten-minute place, and you leave with a cup or a piece of greasy paper in your hand.
Tiramisu After a Day of Walking Palermo
I originally went into Touring just for a coffee, a plan that never survives a long display case. But after a day of walking around Palermo my stomach had had enough, so the arancina bomba never happened, and out of everything Sicilian on offer the least Sicilian thing won: a tiramisu in a cup, a dessert imported from northern Italy. The whipped cream was unbelievable - it sent the whole cup soaring, and we agreed this was one of the best tiramisus we had ever eaten - it was gone in moments. It cost 4 EUR, the coffee with it 1.20 EUR; I paid up front at the register, by pointing. Next time I want to come for breakfast. Or for a late-night glass. At a place that opens at four in the morning and closes at midnight, those luckily don't rule each other out.
Bar Touring
