Eating like gods in Rome
phonemonkey and myself were in Rome for a week. mamlambo is living there and showed us around, including a day at the old Roman port of Ostia. I really recommend it to anyone spending some time in Rome, it's only 20 mins by train and is very cool. Ostia is the first set (being the last photos taken) of Rome photos in my Photobucket. The set after is the ruins of 4 temples they found at Via Argentina in the 30s and which are now used as an open-air cat shelter, including a section where you can drop off cats if you have to give them up or find a stray.
We went through the Forum and saw the Coliseum and walked around most of the sites, blah blah, but I really wanted to post about the food before I forgot it. Such good food, starting with the coffee and cake at the train station at the airport. They have a deal where if you take your coffee standing it's only 70-80 Eurocents whereas if you sit down it's 2.50 EUR. Tiny, tiny single mouthfuls of the most delicious, roasted, intense coffee. Even the commercial bakery cake at the aforementioned train station cafe was good, and the cannoli and such at proper cafes was excellent. As were the cold coffee drinks, like coffee parfait.
I very much like the Italian meal setup where you have the main starch, the pasta, as a first dish and then a main course which you can have on its own or with a side.
The meals that stand out include two concurrent nights at a place called di Enzo in Trastavere, where we went because it looked plain and old school and very, very popular. We had to reserve for the following night on the first night we went there, and enjoyed it so much we reserved it for the following night as well. Traditional Roman fare, heavy on offal dishes, totally unreconstructed trattoria that may not have changed since the 50s (they did have a pennant from the football team of the Rome culinary institute in 1956). One of the dishes I'll try to reproduce was rigatoni with sheep curds, pecorino and black pepper. Slovak sheep curds are easy and cheap to get here (in fact the dish is a bit like Slovak halušky but much better and minus the melted lard) and would work perfectly if allowed to drain a little more first. Another dish there that sticks in the mind is the calf's liver. Sliced very thin, floured and run through an egg wash, then lightly fried just until the egg wash started to blacken but still rare inside. Texture closer to foie gras than I ever knew veal liver could be.
Another major winner was the Sardinian restaurant mamlambo suggested. Everything we had was good, but as she said, the roast boar was something else again. I just had a small piece next to the spine along with some piglet and some mutton on a Sardinian meat sampler plate, but it was the most intensely flavorful meat I've ever eaten. I can't even describe what the flavor was, because it certainly wasn't like pork, or maybe if you took the flavor of 100 close-to-the-bone pork roasts and concentrated them into each bite, and only in a good way.
I won't bother going into the bucatini Amatriciana, a standard Roman dish, or any of the other excellent pasta we had at mamlambo's preferred near-Coliseum eatery. Sadly we had the house signature pasta early in the trip and I don't remember much about it, except that it had Tuscan sausage in it. Or the various herb and ricotta filled raviolis. Or the wider use of lemon than I had thought of. Or the (rather overpriced but very good) meal of traditional Roman Jewish food at the kosher restaurant--I take that back, we did learn a great way of making artichoke. Drop the sucker in a deep fryer. The normally inedible bits of the outer leaves turn brown and crunchy and go perfectly with the mushy heart.
I will say that the gelato is the most amazing ice cream ever, not quite as heavy and rich as Ben and Jerry's yet somehow equally or more flavorful. Simple flavors but each one tastes exactly of what it says. I'm not sure I can explain it. The pistachio ice-cream tasted like what I'd imagine pistachio butter would taste like, intensely of pistachio, making all other pistachio ice-creams I've had seem merely vaguely pistacio-like.
I'll let phonemonkey tell you about the museums and churches and the Forum and all that. We were certainly not bored and could happily spend another week or two going to stuff we didn't see this time.
We went through the Forum and saw the Coliseum and walked around most of the sites, blah blah, but I really wanted to post about the food before I forgot it. Such good food, starting with the coffee and cake at the train station at the airport. They have a deal where if you take your coffee standing it's only 70-80 Eurocents whereas if you sit down it's 2.50 EUR. Tiny, tiny single mouthfuls of the most delicious, roasted, intense coffee. Even the commercial bakery cake at the aforementioned train station cafe was good, and the cannoli and such at proper cafes was excellent. As were the cold coffee drinks, like coffee parfait.
I very much like the Italian meal setup where you have the main starch, the pasta, as a first dish and then a main course which you can have on its own or with a side.
The meals that stand out include two concurrent nights at a place called di Enzo in Trastavere, where we went because it looked plain and old school and very, very popular. We had to reserve for the following night on the first night we went there, and enjoyed it so much we reserved it for the following night as well. Traditional Roman fare, heavy on offal dishes, totally unreconstructed trattoria that may not have changed since the 50s (they did have a pennant from the football team of the Rome culinary institute in 1956). One of the dishes I'll try to reproduce was rigatoni with sheep curds, pecorino and black pepper. Slovak sheep curds are easy and cheap to get here (in fact the dish is a bit like Slovak halušky but much better and minus the melted lard) and would work perfectly if allowed to drain a little more first. Another dish there that sticks in the mind is the calf's liver. Sliced very thin, floured and run through an egg wash, then lightly fried just until the egg wash started to blacken but still rare inside. Texture closer to foie gras than I ever knew veal liver could be.
Another major winner was the Sardinian restaurant mamlambo suggested. Everything we had was good, but as she said, the roast boar was something else again. I just had a small piece next to the spine along with some piglet and some mutton on a Sardinian meat sampler plate, but it was the most intensely flavorful meat I've ever eaten. I can't even describe what the flavor was, because it certainly wasn't like pork, or maybe if you took the flavor of 100 close-to-the-bone pork roasts and concentrated them into each bite, and only in a good way.
I won't bother going into the bucatini Amatriciana, a standard Roman dish, or any of the other excellent pasta we had at mamlambo's preferred near-Coliseum eatery. Sadly we had the house signature pasta early in the trip and I don't remember much about it, except that it had Tuscan sausage in it. Or the various herb and ricotta filled raviolis. Or the wider use of lemon than I had thought of. Or the (rather overpriced but very good) meal of traditional Roman Jewish food at the kosher restaurant--I take that back, we did learn a great way of making artichoke. Drop the sucker in a deep fryer. The normally inedible bits of the outer leaves turn brown and crunchy and go perfectly with the mushy heart.
I will say that the gelato is the most amazing ice cream ever, not quite as heavy and rich as Ben and Jerry's yet somehow equally or more flavorful. Simple flavors but each one tastes exactly of what it says. I'm not sure I can explain it. The pistachio ice-cream tasted like what I'd imagine pistachio butter would taste like, intensely of pistachio, making all other pistachio ice-creams I've had seem merely vaguely pistacio-like.
I'll let phonemonkey tell you about the museums and churches and the Forum and all that. We were certainly not bored and could happily spend another week or two going to stuff we didn't see this time.