Slices of Sicily; D.O.C. Wine Bar

There are enough traditional Sicilian dishes that one can spend a week on the island sampling and never order the same thing twice. Problem is, for several of them once is not enough. I guess the crux of the matter is I didn't have quite enough time on my recent trip to Sicily. Yet plenty of delicious research was managed.

Surprisingly, what New Yorkers call "a slice of Sicilian" is a common Palermo street food. Sort of. The shape and thickness of sfincione, at least, are instantly recognizable. But the real thing is oily instead of crispy and dry, and it's unlikely to have more than a sprinkling of cheese. Of course the tomatoes and onion are fresh. And the doughy crust tastes better. Sicilian wheat products would cause a small riot if they were to show up here, so revealing of our bread and pasta's lifelessness is their soothing rustic flavor.

Another sidewalk snack is a whole boiled octopus, cut into bite-size pieces before your eyes and served with a wedge of lemon. It doesn't get chewy until it cools off. More popular in Palermo are sandwiches of stewed beef spleen, panino alla meusa. I found out it tastes a little like liver and bacon, and that I can't stomach it. Where there's nothing else to eat in Sicily they are usually arancini ("little oranges"), which are deep-fried rice balls stuffed with ham and cheese, and which vary in quality tremendously from train station to train station, though always look the same.

Street snacks are important because except in tourist areas meals are served only at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. In small towns, you get a weird look from the staff if you show up for dinner at 7:50, even though by 8:10 the restaurant is sure to be full for the rest of the night. It's one seating per meal, everything cooked at once. The kitchens explode with activity. During the two pre-meal rush hours per day, traffic is insane even in tiny fishing villages. When the masses leave the restaurants, they head straight to the gelato parlors, which exactly twice a day would host lines twice around the block if Sicilians lined up. It's a kind of regimented chaos?appropriate for a place that's almost in shambles yet ably conserving a wealth of high culture.

A great Sicilian seafood appetizer is beccafico, made by rolling small fish filets around a stuffing of bread crumbs, pine nuts, anchovies, herbs and sometimes cinnamon and raisins. A version with sardines was wonderful, and with a sweeter, fattier little member of the herring family (the waiter called it something like spigola) it was even better. The traditional Sicilian sardine pasta dish, a macaroni with pine nuts and wild fennel, is another sensual rendezvous of sea and earth.

Other seafood highlights include pasta al nero di seppia, different from the black squid pasta you get here in that it comes with no sauce other than ink, and nothing else in the spaghetti besides bits of the recently flagellating creature that spewed the salty black stuff. Tentacles this fresh are tender, and the flavor of the unadorned ink is surprisingly delicate.

The same can't be said of spaghetti with ricci di mare (literally "curlies of the sea"), a similarly simple seafood pasta where the sauce is the scooped-out innards of sea urchins caught earlier that day. My memory of this dish is attached to that of another highlight from my trip: swimming in a mythically beautiful cove on the Aeoliean island of Panarea. Firstly because diving open-eyed into the turquoise water revealed that the cove's submerged volcanic cliffs were populated by sea urchins, happily scuttling along. Secondly because eating pasta con ricci di mari brought on as powerfully as that swim a sense of communion with the sea.

We don't really have the sea here. Nor do we have stores where you can buy wonderful table wine out of enormous metal vats for almost no money. Sicilian whites tend to have a note of honey, as if the grapes soaked up so much warm sun they were ready to caramelize. When you buy from the vat, you bring a water bottle and a girl fills it up from a nozzle exactly like a gas pump's. Wine stations also have wooden casks of various marsalas. One version of this sweet red wine was issued to sailors in the British Royal Navy. Our local shop offered a strawberry variety that was as sweet as candy. Then there's all'Uovo, which contains egg yolks and is said to provide a sexual boost.

On the west coast of Sicily you can still taste the influence of Arabia, of which the island was a part a thousand years ago. The staple snack is panelle, a sandwich of fried chickpea fritters. The signature entree is seafood with couscous, offering yet another take on the island's amazing grain. The west coast city of Trapani has a mindblowing namesake pesto made from almonds. And in the ancient and holy mountaintop city nearby, Erice, is one of Sicily's best pastry shops, Grammatico Maria. The things done there with pistachio paste, ricotta, lemon cake, marzipan and dark Italian chocolate uplift the spirit.

I haven't even mentioned the local capers, or swordfish, smoky tomato pastes, bean and shellfish soups, black plums, frutti di Martorana, only-in-Sicily gelato flavors and more. It's my hope you get a chance to taste them for yourself. As far as describing what kind of eating place Sicily (at least the sliver of it I saw) is, let me tell you about a picnic. We went to a grocery store and bought wine, baguettes still warm from the oven, a jar of local tuna, ripe peaches for dessert. The grocer selected for us a cold cut and a cheese, both of which turned out to be exquisitely cured, just sharp enough to announce their earthy complexity. We carried the food up a steep hill, to the ruins of a Phoenician?later Carthaginian?city. It was a hard, hot climb, but when we arrived we found the site much bigger than our guide books seemed to suggest, with the rocky remains of temples, homes and an amphitheater overlooking the village and sea below. We dutifully started in on our local delicacies at 1 p.m., when everyone else headed down to the restaurants. Soon there were only the two of us, our lunch and some ancient ghosts.

D.O.C. Wine Bar

A new Sardinian wine bar occupies the bottom floor of a typically ugly Williamsburg shingled house. D.O.C.'s interior benefits from some concerted effort at improving the atmosphere. A pair old barn beams, installed perpendicularly where a wall probably used to be, separates the bar from a restaurant seating area. Platters of meats and cheeses are served on smoothly carved wooden trays, and wines come in oversized glasses that give the place a festive air. Smoking is permitted.

A recent Saturday night found D.O.C. overflowing with cheerful customers, few of them hip young-Williamsburg types. These diners must have been colonists of the neighborhood's first wave, now middle-aged survivors of its constant and ongoing rent hikes. D.O.C. didn't seem to have much of a sense of who it was serving?it pumped greatest house-pop hits from Ibiza on the system, much to the delight of the few Euro party people on the premises, who turned out to be friends of the staff's.

A Brooklyn restaurant under the impression that it's in Southern Europe is a good thing, potentially, and nowhere does such serendipity manifest itself than in D.O.C.'s house wines. The white is lively, with a note of pine, and more agreeable than much of what's on the inexpensive end of the bar's list. On the downside, that list needs detailed descriptions, because the staff doesn't have time to talk about wine or anything else, and some of the handwritten menus are illegible, anyway.

You can order shotglass tastings of most of D.O.C.'s wines for $2-$5. The exception I tried was Perdera "Argiolas" '00, and I can't say I loved its sour, old-oak bite. My companion thought it would be well matched with an assertive cheese. D.O.C. in fact offers several wine-and-cheese pairings. And for the risk-averse there're always glasses of a grapey table red, Lacryma Cristi Vesuvio ($6).

One featured food offering is Sardinian flatbread, cracker-thin with needles of oily rosemary here and there. Bites without rosemary, disappointingly, tasted only like bleached North American flour. D.O.C.'s olive assortment ($2) was another thoughtless substitute for what you get over there.

Imported meats and cheeses are what else there is to eat at D.O.C. They come in various combinations, on sandwiches or plates ($10 for assorted cheeses, $9 for assorted meats). They're hit or miss. Our favorites were the ricotta, sharp enough to make an impression without masking its farmhouse character, and the prosciutto crudo, which was as deeply layered as a finger-food can be. The bresaola, mortadella, salami, fontina and mozzarella were decent, though much closer to what New Yorkers can buy at their local fancy grocery store than the full-flavored local products of the Italian isles.

D.O.C. Wine Bar, 83 N. 7th St. (Wythe Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-963-1925.