From Rome we travelled to Florence, and so will my restaurant reports. We arrived in Florence on a Sunday. This made dinner slightly complicated as a lot of restaurants in Florence are closed on Sunday. Our AirBnB host came to our rescue: she had recommendations for a number of restaurants in our general vicinity and among them was one that is actually open on Sundays: Trattoria Acquacotta. They are located a little outside the core tourist zone on Via dei Pilastri, right where it hits Via Fiesolana. Though keep in mind that Florence is much smaller than Rome, which means that if you’re visiting as a tourist, odds are good that everywhere you might want to go will be within walking distance. As it turned out, all the places we were to eat at were not only within walking distance, two were literally steps from our flat and a third was less than 5 minutes walk away. Acquacotta was far away by comparison, being about an 8 minute walk. I am happy to say that while it wasn’t the best restaurant meal we ate in Florence, it was well worth the walk. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Italy
Trattoria Pennestri (Rome, June 2023)
Here now is a report on our last meal out in Rome. For lunch on our last full day we’d taken the bus out to Testaccio and eaten at the Mercato Testaccio. In the evening we once again traveled out of the main tourist center for dinner—this time by the metro to the Ostiense neighbourhood, for dinner at Trattoria Pennestri. Like Santo Palato, this is a relatively new restaurant, helmed by an Italian-Danish chef (with the last name Pennestri) and an Argentinean wine director. They are known for their mix of classic and updated Roman cuisine and have received a fair bit of recognition in the press. We were very much looking forward to the meal. Well, I can report that the food was indeed excellent; alas, the meal was marred more than a little by another factor. Continue reading
Mercato Testaccio (Rome, June 2023)
Lunch on our third full day in Rome also featured pizza but it was not eaten at a restaurant; it also featured more than pizza. We took the bus out of of the tourist center to check out and eat at Mercato Testaccio. As the name indicates, Mercato Testaccio (or Mercato di Testaccio, if you want to be more grammatically correct—though the market’s own signage clearly doesn’t) is located in the Testaccio neighbourhood. Unlike a market like Campo di Fiori—where we had fruit juice earlier in the day—Mercato Testaccio is located indoors, in a modern building that lets in a lot of air and light. It is filled with stalls (or boxes in the market’s parlance) that range from clothing and shoe stores to butchers and fishmongers to fruit and veg sellers to a range of food purveyors. In the center is a seating area where most people vie for tables to eat. In other words, it’s along the lines of similar markets found in many large cities around the world, including Minneapolis’ own Midtown Global Market. Continue reading
Trattoria Monti (Rome, June 2023)
Two things to note about Trattoria Monti to start: first, despite the name, the restaurant is located not in the Monti neighbourhood but in the adjoining Esquilino. The location was a big plus for us, as our flat was also in Esquilino, just 7-8 minutes walk away. Esquilino is an immigrant-heavy neighbourhood and on AirBnB reviews and elsewhere you are likely to come across not-very-coded references to it being or feeling “unsafe” for this reason. We found it to be no such thing. We very much enjoyed being in the midst of the Bangladeshi, Chinese, Korean and African populations of the area and getting a sense of a newer, multicultural Rome; in fact, I purchased excellent mangoes from a Bangladeshi store and spoke more Bengali in four days in Rome than I have in many years in Minnesota! And the neighbourhood itself we found pleasant both during the day and after dark. We didn’t have a single sketchy encounter walking back from the metro station in the late evenings; and as we walked back after dinner at Trattoria Monti much of the neighbourhood was watching a movie together in the central Piazza Vittorio Emanuelle II. So much for unsafe. Continue reading
Pizzarium (Rome, June 2023)
If you ask people with a decent knowledge of Rome’s food scene for recommendations of places to eat pizza, odds are good that Pizzarium will pop up on the top of everyone’s list. Unlike at Emma—where we ate the previous day—they do not do whole pizzas with thin, crisp crusts. Their specialty is pizza al taglio (or pizza by the slice), on thick bready crusts, cut and served in rectangles or squares of a size of your choosing and priced by weight. This is basically the model followed by a place like Mama’s Too in New York. The difference here is that at Pizzarium the experience is less hectic—despite the place being even more crowded—and the staff are patient and not at all unpleasant. And, oh yes, the pizza is a lot better. Continue reading
Emma (Rome, June 2023)
On our first full day in Rome we had an excellent lunch in the middle of a very hot day of hardcore touristing: the Colosseum, the Palatine Hill, the Forum etc.. It was hot, hot, hot in Rome, with blazing sun and no little humidity, and what had seemed like an easy 15 minute walk from the Forum to Emma turned into a bit of a trial. We arrived hot, sweaty and cranky but unlike a number of fellow tourists waiting at the door, at least we had a reservation. Alas, this reservation—made weeks before—didn’t get us an indoor table under the air conditioning. We were shunted instead to an outdoor table—covered seating, yes, but still very hot, and with the sun advancing on our table, not the most comfortable situation as the meal went on. The food, however, was very good indeed. Herewith, the details. Continue reading
Santo Palato (Rome, June 2023)
My fourth restaurant report from our trip to Italy is of our first meal in Rome, at Santo Palato, a small, relatively new trattoria that serves up slightly tweaked versions of classic Roman dishes. Now this last part I am not really equipped to judge: I don’t know very much about Roman cuisine and so cannot tell you in what ways exactly the dishes we ate riffed on classic preparations (if all even did). What I can tell you is that this was a fantastic meal, perhaps the family’s consensus pick for the best formal meal of the trip; it was certainly my favourite meal of the trip. It almost got derailed on the way to the restaurant though… Continue reading
Mimi alla Ferrovia (Naples, June 2023)
We are in Padua with only a few days remaining in our Italian itinerary. I am very far behind on the meal reports, which may take the rest of my life to get caught up on. Here, for example, is only my third report, covering our very first meal in Italy, eaten just an hour after our arrival in Naples. We took a cab to our AirBnB flat, got checked in and then headed for Mimi alla Ferrovia. This is a Neapolitan institution. The name comes from the fact that the original proprietor’s nickname was Mimi and the restaurant is located by the train station (ferrovia). I got to it as well via Katie Parla’s website—she recommends it as a less informal place to get classic Neapolitan cooking. It’s not that I was looking for more formal places but the fact that I could make an online booking and be assured of dinner without a wait after arrival was very attractive. Our flat was also just about a 15 minute walk away. Our AirBnB host, however, dissuaded us from walking there—the area by the station can apparently be sketchy after dark—and put us in a cab. On our way back the restaurant likewise advised against walking back and called us a cab. Between cabs, the meal itself was rather good. Continue reading
Pizzeria da Attilio (Naples, 2023)
We are currently in Italy and will be here a little while longer. As I type we are getting set to leave Rome for Florence. But we started our trip in Naples. Which is also where we started our over-eating. This lunch at Pizzeria da Attilio was not our first meal in Naples (that was dinner at Mimi alla Ferrovia the previous evening) but it seems right to begin an account of eating in Naples with pizza. And so.
As you would expect, there is a lot of good pizza to be had in Naples and probably almost as many opinions on which the best places to eat pizza in Naples as there are pizza-eating people in Naples. We were staying on Via Duomo, very close to the two most famous places: Antica Pizzeria da Michele and Gino e Toto Sorbillo. We did not, however, eat at either of them. This was largely because both are so popular that you have to wait a really long time to get a table—and if there’s something we don’t like to do when traveling with the kids, it’s waiting at restaurants. But we couldn’t have eaten at both anyway, as one of our two pizza meal slots in the city was spoken for by Attilio. Continue reading