29 September 2024 The Eternal City is eternally crowded, as witness the queue in St Peter’s Square as early as 7.15 am. The crowds find no shortage of restaurants.
Rome, which next year celebrates a Jubilee Year, expects to welcome 30 million visitors during 2025. Perhaps most of the construction we witnessed on a recent short visit and which seemed to affect almost every street we walked down and every view we stopped at, will have been finished by then.
I remain somewhat sceptical. Even during a working week in late September, the crowds seemed to be everywhere and although I appreciate that today many Italians speak and understand English, there is something disheartening about being sat at a restaurant table and immediately presented with the menu in English. Not only is Italian the most romantic language to listen to but there is something very pleasurable about being surrounded by people speaking in any tongue other than English/American.
Hailing a taxi is not that easy either in Rome but they are inexpensive. We managed to catch two and my strongest memory of the experience is of being driven along at extreme speed on narrow, cobbled streets by young men with buzz haircuts and baseball caps, the wrong way round of course, with one eye at least seemingly on their iPhone which alone knew the route. We survived.
And we ate well, very well, assisted by the advice of Walter, our Italian-wine critic, but there was only one meal that stood out as outstanding. What follows is written for someone who would enjoy good food and wine in comfortable surroundings where Romans and not tourists gather.
Al Moro makes much of the fact that it opened in 1929. The date is all over the menu cover and moro1929 is their Wi-Fi password. Little seems to have changed although the walls have accumulated a huge number of artworks in the intervening years. The crowded interior is testimony to how much smaller physically customers were 95 years ago. Everybody appeared to be Roman. We sat next to a table of three men who were stylishly attired and so close that it was impossible not to overhear their conversation in Italian. (The tables bore witness to Walter’s recent assertion in Business lunches dry out that wine with lunch is de rigueur in Italy.)
The owner is conspicuous by his height, charm and languid style. He is tall and thin with a roving eye and as well dressed as his waiting staff. The menu arrived – in English (the restaurant is extremely close to the Trevi fountain) – and was full of Roman specialities into which I decided to plunge head first.
I began with spaghetti con la bottarga and continued with trippa alla Romana, neither of which was disappointing, and nor was our half-bottle of 2021 Montefalco from Arnaldo Caprai. The pasta was al dente and the bottarga quotient was extremely generous; the tripe was delicious even if the sauce was a little one-dimensional in that it was so tomato-based. With a coffee and a couple of antipasti for JR, my bill came to €106. This lunch was an excellent introduction to Rome.
My lunch the following day after an early morning in the Vatican was, too. While JR was otherwise engaged, I decided to walk up to the Jewish Quarter, one of the city’s most affecting areas, where my decision as to where to eat ‘Jewish artichokes’ was decided by a place mat.
The Via del Portico d’Ottavia (above) is full of old buildings with temple ruins at the far end but the street itself is little more than a sequence of restaurants with pretty similar menus. Outside every one of them there are a couple of young men urging you to come in and try. But at Nonna Betta there was the lure of a place mat with Hebrew lettering which spelt out Kavòd, the honour we should show our fellow man. I immediately sat down there.
The food was good. I ordered a plate of fried anchovies, fried artichokes and fried courgette flowers. The artichokes, one of which is shown above, were wonderful and seemed to get better the colder they became. I thought they would make a great first course at home, looked up the recipe but then decided that the dish would probably be vetoed by the wine police. As I left, I passed a table of artichokes below, all ready for the fryer. My bill came to €25.
From a street full of restaurants populated by tourists, to two very different places where non-Romans were very much in the minority: Al Ceppo and L’Osteria di Monteverde.
Al Ceppo is in a smart residential area close to the Borghese Gardens and does not open its doors until 8 pm – a sure sign of catering to locals only. When we walked in shortly after 8, two tables were already occupied, by Americans. By 9 pm the restaurant was full of Romans. The restaurant’s charms – it opened in 1969 – include an open grill that faces onto a large table for eight in a cosy library nook and a delightful wine list that also includes well-priced bottles from outside Italy. These include plenty from Burgundy, Germany, Bordeaux and some recent arrivals from Slovenia although the sommelier observed, ‘they drink everything they make over there’. We enjoyed a bottle of 2019 Barbaresco Montestefano from Produttori del Barbaresco for €80 and ended up after three courses with a bill of €250 for two.
The drama I witnessed may not be on show every night. But not long after we sat down, the woman who seemed to be part of the family owning the restaurant walked in to start her evening’s work. She was clearly not happy with the manner in which the tables had been allocated and she made her unhappiness very clear to all her waiting staff. Then, when certain tables had been reset and she personally moved a table for two where there had not been one, she calmed down. The storm had passed, the staff got on with looking after their customers, and everyone had a good time. The room buzzed and there was considerable table-hopping between families who clearly knew each other.
Our food was fine, if unexceptional. A first course of courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta was followed by a dish described as rosemary-grilled veal sweetbreads with potato cream. But there was a noticeable absence of rosemary from the meat and cream from the potato and little effect of the grill on the meat which was disappointing. JR was happier with her choices: succulent porcini (listed as a main course but recommended as a starter) followed by bucatini amatriciana with crunchy guanciale.
The restaurant to whose cooking I lost my heart is the simply named L’Osteria di Monteverde. It’s on a side street in Monteverde, another, less glamorous residential suburb of Rome south of Trastevere. (Both this restaurant and Al Ceppo had been recommended by Walter.)
Opened in 2010 by chef Roberto Campitelli and front of house Fabio Tenderini, L’Osteria di Monteverde is as straightforward as it looks. Wooden tables and chairs; the kitchen off to the back of the building; and the walls crammed with photos of their musical heroes – the Beatles, Bowie, The Doors and the Sex Pistols – and of the Rome of yesteryear.
The simple, mildly inventive food was most elegantly cooked. I began with a ‘toasted’ veal tongue enlivened with an anchovy-and-peach-infused sauce and then followed this with strangozzi, a long pasta from Umbria slightly thicker than spaghetti, with a thick, creamy cacio e pepe sauce (so difficult to do well) with which we drank the 2020 Riesling Vigna Windbichel from Castel Juval in Alto Adige at €56, specifically recommended by Walter. JR much enjoyed her watermelon gaspacho (it was very hot day) and chose a caponata on a creamy tomato base. Best of all was the dessert, a semifreddo – a dish I would like to see adopted far more widely – of a chocolate dome on top of a yogurt ice cream lightly spiced with ginger. It was delicious and brought the bill for two to €121.
I wish L’Osteria di Monteverde as long a life as Al Moro.
Trattoria al Moro Vicolo delle Bollette 13, 00187 Rome, Italy; tel: +39 (0)6 678 3495
Nonna Betta Via del Portico d’Ottavia 16, 00186 Rome, Italy; tel: +39 (0)6 6880 6263
Al Ceppo Via Panama 2, 00198 Rome, Italy; tel: +39 (0)6 841 9696
L’Osteria di Monteverde Via Pietro Cartoni 163, 00152 Rome, Italy; tel: +39 (0)6 5327 3887
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
