BUON APPETITO!
Eating Street by Street in Rome
by armen pandola
Rome is a city of tourists and so you must expect that there are places catering to tourists, that is, dumps! As you might imagine, those places are closest to the tourist spots - the Coliseum, Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, Vatican, etc.
But there is another truth about Rome - it’s a city of foodies. Yes, every Roman expects the best food from her morning expresso to her evening gelato. Anything less and - arrivederci!
So the answer to finding the best places is easy - ask a Roman.
Wherever you are staying - in an airbnb, a hotel, a hostel, there are Romans anxious to tell you where their favorite food spats are.
One of the best ways to learn is to take a food tour early on in your stay so you can reap the benefits throughout your visit.
We took a food tour with Eating Europe, an international food tour company, and with its Taste of Testaccio Tour. Testaccio is a neighborhood in Rome known for its good - if you are from Philadelphia, think, South Philly. The neighborhood is becoming gentrified but it still has a slew of great eateries, including a food market that we will get to.
Valentina was our knowledgeable, fashionably dressed hostess. One of the things you will notice in Rome from the start is that Romans like to dress smartly. We started at a small deli-restaurant where we were served dishes of Italian cured meats and cheeses with a glass of Prosecco, the Italian bubbly wine used for everything from toasts to the major ingredients in ‘spritzs’, e.g. a Campari Spritz.
From there, we traveled to a bakery where we sampled the pizza. Roman pizza is thin with a thick crust. It comes with a large variety of toppings - the usual cheeses, artichokes, egg plant, fiore de zucchini (zucchini blossoms), olives, potatoes (yes, very thinly sliced potatoes!) and many others. One of my favs was the pizza with just a slathering of a savory tomato sauce known as the ‘fisherman’s pizza’ because it can be taken out to sea and eaten many days later since there is nothing to go bad with time and heat.
Then we went to the market in Testaccio, a large indoor space with dozens of food stalls, some selling just produce, meats or cheeses, but many selling ‘street foods’ to eat on the go. One of my favs and that of many Romans is carciofo romanesco (a much larger artichoke than sold in the US) These are prepared one of two ways: the famous fried preparation called Guidica since they originated in Rome’s Jewish quarter or carciofi alla romana (artichokes simmered with oil and herbs). Both are delicious but my preference is the fired version - the leaves are like the best crispy potato chips you ever ate!
We sampled the famed Caprese Salad, fresh tomatoes with Buffalo mozzarella which is much tastier than regular mozzarella. The tomatoes in Italy have an intense, sweet taste unlike any other tomatoes in the world. This food stall sold only cheeses and meats and was run by Lucca and Marina, married for 67 years. One of us asked Lucca what the secret of a happy marriage was and he said, I only handle the cheeses and she only handles the meats.
We lunched at a famed Testaccio restaurant near a hillside made up of broken clay pots - Monte Testaccio or Broken Pot Mountain is a man-made mound built from broken terracotta and ceramic pots or Amphora, dating back to the days of the Roman Empire. It is the largest "waste" heap discovered in the ancient world and holds over 500,000 cubic meters of pots. Clay pots were cheap but difficult to clean so the Romans simply threw them onto a heap which grew with the centuries into a large hill.
There we had the famed tonnarelli carbonara, a pasta made with egg and “guanciale” an Italian cured meat product prepared from pork jowl or cheeks. Romans are nust for guanciale and put it in almost everything. If you don’t eat pork, beware! For those of us who don’t, there was cacio e pepe, a pasta made with cheese and pepper that has no sauce but makes its own sauce after it is cooked and turned over and over - the steam and the cheese combine to make a delicious sauce of its own!
Finally, we headed for the kids (well, and the adults too) favorite spot - the gelato store. Here there were about twenty varieties of gelato. Gelato is made with milk, not cream and so melts faster - and tastes better. Valentina explained that those places with ‘150’ varieties are frauds - usually mass-produced. The true gelato store makes all its own flavors and these are not piled high - those are whipped up and contain mostly air.
And so ended one of our most satisfying days. Valentina shared with us some of her favorite restaurants and, more importantly, taught is that eating on the go in Rome can be a real gourmet experience.