NOTE: I am not currently in Italy. I wrote this post about Roman restaurants back in February and I kept meaning to publish it, but each week that went by I thought “A LISTICLE?? IN THIS TIMELINE?!” Anyway, it’s still the apocalypse but it’s now summer in the apocalypse, and friends are now traveling in Rome and desiring recs. So I’m posting this during peak use-value season. Send it to someone who can use it!
A RECOMMENDATION MEDITATION BEFORE THE RECS
I move through the world amassing lists and maps. I like to tailor the lists and maps for friends to create personal itineraries for enjoyment.
My favorite way to do recs is just to send a Google Map with all the best locations favorited. Maps are meant to make the rounds. In my phone I have a precious map of Rome created in 2017 by a friend-of-friend-of-friend who I don’t know, which I’ve been using and pruning and tailoring for years. Someone I sent a personal map to even wrote an NYT letter of rec inspired by the map I sent her, in which she recs sending maps of recs, an amazing example of exponential rec growth.
Everyone likes customized private recs and leaked maps over public listicles. I do not enter the rec economy lightly when we are far beyond “the critic and her tastes” content like books and art. But I do taste A LOT OF FOOD and I bet you do want to know where to eat in Rome.
Enough! Here is the glorified listicle about WHAT to eat in ROME and WHERE to eat it, and if you want to do penance for all you ate, WHERE to buy HOLY SOCKS and meet PRIESTS.
THE PASTAS AND THE WEEDS
Just about every Roman restaurant serves the Four Roman Pastas. Amatriciana, Carbonara, Cacio e Pepe, and alla Gricia. You’ll get various combinations of pecorino, guanciale (jowl-bacon-chonks), egg, and tomato. That said, they are not even slightly interchangeable, and you must find your sovereign. For me, alla Gricia reigns supreme because it is the saltiest; Carbonara’s egg content gives me a stomach ache (weird; I am egg queen), Amatriciana’s tomatoes overpower me, and Cacio e Pepe will always slap but my thought is if you could add meat and salt you should.
These are the staples and will serve you well. Also, you will get tired of them after you’ve done the rotation thrice. (Friend Theresia recently revealed to me that there is a secret überpasta that combines them all, alla Zozzona, which sounds like sacrilege, but I’d eat it.)
The first time I went to Rome, Friend Jess warned me that if I ate enough of the four pastas I would experience psychedelic “cheese dreams” at night, which is true. I’ll show you my cheese-nightmare diary if you show me yours. The cheese nightmare is another reason you cannot eat the pastas over three nights in a row.
Beyond the pastas, the best thing about Romanfare is what people may speak of as The Weeds. An assortment of cooked greens are on every menu, usually sautéed in oil, and crucially they are not chopped up but left at full length so that (especially if you’re still on your Invisalign Journey like I am) you might choke. The near-choking is the secret excitement of the meal. The most common weeds are CHICORIA and SCAROLA which could be translated to chicory and escarole but they don’t compare to what I know of those vegetables. If you are coming from the US you can feel the vitamins leeching into your deprived, GMO-addled, corn-fed body.
This year I happened to be in Rome during January and February, puntarelle season extraordinaire. Puntarelle are also a variant of chicory, but they are a unique veg. You eat them RAW. They have long, very crisp and cronchy and curly stalks that you have to cut vertically in a special way. I would call it a celery-adjacent experience. The way to prepare them is in an emulsified blend of anchovies, garlic, and oil. Some restaurants will tell you that sadly they are out of puntarelle by dinnertime, because Romans eat them as a kind of seasonal celebratory food. God love a seasonal celebratory food.
