The Best in Rome

The Best in Rome

Rome Restaurants: Paper Tablecloths

Freni e Frizioni
This restaurant and bar attracts a young crowd. On weekends its crowded, and the music is hardly in the background, but it’s a great spot for socializing. Formerly used as a workshop, the polished wooden drawers that once held parts and equipment, have been recycled and are still in use. The appeal of the place, for the twenty-something clientele lies in its laid-back atmosphere and low prices. Five euro will buy you a glass wine, beer or prosecco, and, for a little extra, a mixed drink. At the apperitivo hour, there’s a buffet with Indian, Brazilian and some Italian cuisine.  Dishes range from roasted chicken, to couscous, curried rice and Caesar salad. Open for lunch dinner, and Sunday brunch.  (KG)
Via del Politeama 4-6 Roma (Trastevere, near Ponte Sisto, Piazza Trilussa)
tel 06 58334210 or 06 45497499  www.freniefrizioni.com

Bar da BenitoLocated in the old Ghetto, this bar/restaurant offers delicious food at a bargain price. The waiters are super quick to clear the tables and get you ready to eat in no time. Primi plates average a low €4,50, secondi range from €4,50 to €7, 50, and desserts are only €3. While this is no romantic spot, the food is extremely good and cheap.
Via dei Falegnami 14, ( Ghetto)
Open Monday - Saturday, 6:30 am-7 pm. Closed in August.
tel 06 686 1508

Il Baffetto
Romans and foreigners with up-to-date guidebooks line up outside this pizzeria, but the wait is short and well worth it. The price is low and the quality superb. Thin-crust, classic Roman pizza comes straight from the forni a legna (wood-burning oven) with almost any combination of toppings you can imagine. If pizza isn’t your fancy, there are other offerings on the menu, and for dessert, don’t miss the panna cotta fatta in casa (a caramel pudding made on the premises).
Via del Governo Vecchio, 114 tel. 06.686 1617

Capo de FeroOne of Rome's few remaining authentic trattorie, this place has been in business for decades, and the low prices and high quality remain the same. Here you can have a lovely meal in a charming setting for a very decent price. The speciality is "rigatoni democratici." No one can remember how the dish got its name, but it's a wonderful pasta in a delicious creamy cheese sauce. The antipasto buffet is expansive and full of all the Roman specialities, perfectly prepared. They also do a wonderful pasta alla carbonaraas well as a variety of grilled fish and meats, and offer a nice selection of cakes and puddings for dessert. Outside tables during the warmer months.
Via San Cosimato, 16 tel 06 581 8038 Closed Wednesdays.

Il Fico
A fixture for years in its former location under a spreading fig tree in Piazza del Fico, the restaurant has recently moved around the corner to Via Monte Giordano, but the excellent food, decent wine list, friendly service and low prices have remained unchanged. Where else can you get a great plate of pasta for six euro? Or try the veal with pistachios for eleven euro. They also do an outstanding job with Roman classics like pasta all'amatriciana, artichokes and stuffed zucchini flowers. There's a smoking room for the addicted, and tables outside, with heat lamps for al fresco dining on chilly nights.
Via Monte Giordano 49 tel 06 687 5568

Da GinoCavaliere Gino has been a favourite lunch stop for staff at the nearby Parliament since 1963. Tucked away on a small street no wider than a medieval alley, Gino, with the help of his son Fabrizio, continues to offer the classic cucina romanesca: tonnarelli (a long pasta prepared fresh daily) alla ciociara, cacio e pepe, carbonara, spaghetti alle vongole, or a fresh scomorza alla brace for non meat eaters. If you've room for an entreè try the lamb with roasted potatoes, rabbit simmered in white wine or the succulent trippa alla romana.
Vicolo Rosini, 4 (historic center near Parliament) tel 06 687 3434
Open for lunch only

Enoteca CorsiThis legendary trattoria, and its adjacent wine store, are legendary in Rome, a favorite for quick lunch and as authentic as you can get. You'll be seated at a long table with other diners and the waiter will recite the menu to you, which limited but always delicious. The place is always packed so get there early.
via del Gesù 87 (near the Pantheon) tel 06 679 0821
Open for lunch only. Closed Sunday.

Est! Est! Est!The young Roman crowd, smoking and talking on their cell phones in the street while they wait for a table, attests to the popularity of this historic Rome restaurant and pizzeria, which has been serving the hungry since 1888. In warmer months, there’s a patio, set out at the end of the cul de sac street, with a decidedly “old Rome” atmosphere. Inside, not much has changed over the decades. The old wooden tables, vintage lighting and bronze statues are all still in place. The pizza is typically Roman, thin crusted with all the traditional toppings. The menu also includes calzone and pasta. €
Via Genova, 32 tel. 06.488 1107 Closed Monday and at lunch.

Hostaria Dino ExpressA typical Italian restaurant, inexpensive and genuine, no bigger than a kitchen with few tables, and a relatively quick turnover. You'll need to get there early or be prepared to queue up. The menu is simple, traditional home cooking; vegetable soup, saltimboocca al timone, carpaccio di carne con rughetta, prosciutto e melone, lasagne, pasta e cecci and polpette. Our favourite is always the ossobuco, a Roman dish prepared with veal, tomato sauce and peas.
Via Tacito, 80 Prati (near Piazza Cavour) tel 06 361 0305
Open for lunch only

Insalata Ricca
This restaurant offers huge salads and ample plates of pasta. The salads come in about 25 combinations and are easily for two people. Numerous pasta dishes, grilled meats and fish, pizza and desserts are also availale. We recommend the, rich potato salad, which is huge and delicious. Try the crispy focaccio instead of the normal bread basket. Downside: the service can be a little slow. The salads range from €7 to €;, the pastas go for €7 to €8 and desserts are in the €4 range. There are 9 locations in Rome, but not all have pizza ovens. Best locations are in Trastevere and near the Campo de'Fiori.
Via G. C. Santini 12 (Trastevere)
Via Garibaldi 8 (Trastevere)
Largo dei Chiavari, 85-86 (Campo de' Fiori
Piazza Pasquino, 72 (Piazza Navona)
Piazza Albania 3-5 (Piramide)
Piazza Risorgimento 4-5 (Prati)
Via Fulcieri Paulucci De' Calboli, 50 (Prati)
Via Francesco Grimaldi 52-54 (Marconi)
Viale Regina Margherita 182 (Parioli)
Open daily from noon to 4:30 pm and 8 pm to midnight tel 06 583 00096

L'Osteria della Suburra
This small restaurant some of the best home made pastas in Rome. The ambiece is very laid back and relaxing. The fettucine with porcini mushrooms is amazing, but if you'd something more adventureous, try the wild boar pasta. A good deal in the €10 to €15 price range. For dessert try the home-made tiramisu. The servers are super friedly and most of them speak English.
Via Urbana 69 (Prati, near the Cavour Metro B stop)
Open daily for dinner only tel 06 486 531

Miscellanea
This is a great place for international students. A long list of the international universities whose students frequent the place lines one of the walls. A medium beer will cost you €5, not really a bargain, but they offer food at great prices. You can get a salad or a pizza and a drink for just €7. International students also benefit from 10% any food purchasePerhaps, the best thing about this cozy place is its owner, Mickey, one of the friendliest guys you'll ever meet. First time there, expect most of the drinks to be on the house. The hospitality at this place is unlikely to be matched anywhere in Rome.
Via delle Paste (near the Pantheon)
Open 7 days a week.

Primo Cafe
This is a nice little cafè offers terrific food at a budget price. Apart from their inexpensive lunch menu, they offer a great buffet, which is not overly Americanized. Don't expect a lot of the usual fried food , but rather fresh salads, pasta, antipasto, and so on. They do have fried chicken and such as well for the those Americans seeking some extra grease. The alcoholic drinks are run about €6.
Via dei Baullari 147
Open 7 days a week; 8:00 am - 2:00 am.
Buffet from 6:30 to 10:00 pm. All you can eat for for the price of one drink.
Cocktail Bar from 10:00 pm to 2:00 am
tel 06 647 60179

Sora MargheritaThere's usually a line waiting to get into this tiny place, because the food is so good and the prices so low. Find Roman specialities here cooked to perfection, pastas, fried artichokes, usually an entrée of the day.
Piazza delle Cinque Scuole 30 (Ghetto) tel 06 687 4216
Open for lunch only Tuesday- Friday; lunch and dinner Friday and Saturday

Teatro di Pompeo - Da Pancrazio Restaurant,
In the ruins of the Teatro di Pompeo, this restaurant offers a unique archaeological ambience. Two dining rooms are decorated in the style of an 18th-century tavern, with cave-like designs sprawling throughout the whole restaurant. T. The servers here are very serious about their work, and will recommend what the chef prefers to cook that day. The saltimbocca and tender roast lamb with potatoes, which were recommended to us were absolutely delicious. The stuffed ravioli is a must for pasta lovers. Main courses range from €10 to €20 so you're getting a bang for your buck as well as a true Roman meal.
Piazza del Biscione 92 (near Campo de' Fiori)
Open daily for dinner. Closed Wednesday tel 06 6861246

T-bone Station Steakhouse
This American steakhouse truly lives up to its name. The decor here is what you would expect from a Hard Rock Cafe, but the food is much cheaper and ironically, much better. The menu includes everything from mouth-watering burgers to chicken wings to the t-bone NY steak. The food gets served very quickly, the servers are polite and English-friendly. The downside is that the place tends to get a little crowded in the late evening, especially on weekends. The Soprano burger is a must try, delivering a mouth-watering experience for only about €13.
Via Francesco Crispi 27 (near the Barberini metro stop)
V Via di San Dorotea 21 (Trastevere)
Via Flaminia Vecchia 525/527 (near Corso Francia).
Open Monday- Friday, 12:30 pm-3pm and 7:30 pm-12 am ;
Saturday - Sunday, 7:30 pm-12:30 am tel 06 0667 87650


Vizi Capitali
This cozy restaurant developed its menu around the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. The multi-course tasting menu offers the best eating experience. Some of the dishes from the menu recall characters from Dantes' Inferno: the gluttony of Ciacco, the superb Filippo Argenti and the lustful Paolo e Francesca." Although the tasting meal might sometime be a little above the budget leve (about €25), the single course meals are delicious and cooked to perfection. The pasta with wild boar sauce is highly recommeded, although it's not always available. The desserts include anything from chocolate mousse to gelato. Although this place may seem a little pricy at first, it can be perfectly affordable if two people split the ample tasting menu, adding an extra first course.
Vicolo della Renella 94 (Trastevere)
Open daily from 7 pm to 2 am. Closed Sundays. tel 06 5818840

A taxi stand in Rome’s Piazza Venezia. Photograph: imagebroker/Alamy

"Are you coming to Rome for a holiday?" the snowy-haired Italian sitting next to me on the plane asked.

"Actually, no," I said. "I'm coming to write about taxi drivers. And their favourite places to eat."
The man, an engineer and hobby archaeologist who was born and raised in Rome, slapped his hand to his forehead. "Our taxi drivers," he shook his head, "are terribili!"
He was not the first person to warn me about taxi drivers in Rome. Year after year, they are voted among the worst in the world. According to a 2011 EuroTest report by 22 European automobile clubs, "Rome's taxi drivers are aggressive, do not respect speed limits and traffic lights, and take long detours off the requested route."
In other words, if there was any city where taxi drivers were going to take me for a ride, it was Rome. But however naive it might have sounded to the Roman I met on the plane, I believed that some of the capital's 8,000 tassisti would show me where to find good things to eat in their city.

I based this belief on a steak. Five years ago I decided to climb into a random cab in Buenos Aires and ask the driver to take me to his favourite restaurant. After the taxista delivered me to a transcendent bife de lomo at a side-street steakhouse called Parrilla Peña, I started hopping into cabs in Buenos Aires, Berlin and New York, asking drivers where to eat and documenting my discoveries on a blog called taxigourmet.com.

In New York, I met two female cab drivers who showed me the way to Jamaican curried goat and Puerto Rican mofongo – and convinced me that I could drive a yellow taxi, too, which I did, for a year, chauffeuring everyone from hysterical brides to ex-New Yorkers searching for pastrami.

No one, my colleagues taught me, knows a city better than a cabbie. And four trips to Italy had taught me that few people know food better than Italians. What would happen if I tested these two truths in Rome – a city with some of the greatest food, and some of the most notorious taxi drivers, in the world?

"Buona sera," I said to the tassista who was parked, along with six of his colleagues, next to the Esso station on Piazza Albania. He winced at my accent and started rolling a cigarette.
"I'm looking for a cheap restaurant not too far from here," I continued.

"I never eat at restaurants around here," he said.

 

The trio of 'pizzaioli' at Pizzeria Remo. Photograph: Alamy A tassista in a brown T-shirt with an opera singer's belly stepped out of his cab. "Go to Testaccio," he said. "There are lots of restaurants there. You'll find something."
"No, no," I said. "I'm a taxi driver, too. I want to go somewhere you would eat."
"Somewhere I would eat?" the cigarette-rolling cabbie said. He looked at the chubby tassista. They started laughing.
"Hey!" said the chubby tassista. "What about Remo?"
"Si!" said the cigarette-rolling cabbie. "Remo! They have good pizza."
"Can you take me there?" I said.
"You don't need us to take you!" said the cigarette-rolling cabbie. "Turn right at the signal, then left, then right. It's on Piazza di Santa Maria Liberatrice. There's a pharmacy across the street."
I'd already started to question the stereotypes about Roman cabbies on the walk to Pizzeria Remo and one glance at the Italian families celebrating on Tuesday night at the restaurant's pavement tables and one bite of pizza bianca con fiori di zucca – with olive oil, mozzarella, courgette flowers and a sprinkling of anchovies – moved me to outright optimism. True to Roman tradition, the toppings were spare but fresh, and the crust, thinner than the plate, charred on the edges, chewy but soft, was the masterwork of a trio of bandana-wearing pizzaioli who manned the wood-burning oven next to the entrance of the restaurant. The tassisti could easily have driven me in circles before dropping me off here, I thought, but they didn't.

Layne Mosler in her cab in New York. Photograph: Rumen Milkow

Were the tassisti at Piazza Albania the exception rather than the rule? The next day I walked to the taxi stand at Piazza Bologna, 4km north-east of the city centre, to find out. Rossella Falasca was driving the cab at the front of the queue. "You won't find Roman food in this neighbourhood," said Falasca, who has been driving for nine years and is one of approximately 1,200 female cabbies in Rome. "You have to go to Testaccio or Trastevere. But that way," she pointed to Via Sambucuccio d'Alando, "is a good seafood restaurant. I went there a few days ago."

Marco Magliozzi, the owner of La Fraschetta del Pesce, was amused that a tassista had sent me to his restaurant. "Our pasta boiler is broken," said Magliozzi, who worked as a fisherman and owned three fish stores before he opened La Fraschetta this March. "But we can do some antipasti, maybe a fritto misto for you." What followed – calamari with olive oil and lemon, mussels steamed with garlic, leeks and Castelli Romani white wine, grilled sea bass, crab and shrimp – were glorious expressions of what Magliozzi calls cucina alla marinara: simple dishes designed to showcase the quality of "our seafood".
After I met Simone Bellini, my rising faith in the food knowledge of Roman cab drivers reached fever pitch. The tassista led me to fantastic versions of rigatoni alla carbonara and trippa alla Romana at La Tavernaccia da Bruno – a family-run trattoria a few blocks from where the cabbie grew up, near the train station in Trastevere. He also insisted I try La Nuova Cantinetta, an archetypal Roman trattoria in Garbatella where he eats rigatoni alla pajata (with tomato sauce, milk-fed calf intestines and pecorino Romano) every week.
Reality hit after I took the underground to Cinecittà, the film studio where Federico Fellini made La Dolce Vita. There, on the outskirts of Rome, I hoped to find a tassista who could show me a restaurant that wasn't in a guidebook. Instead I met a cabbie who told me about a "terrible" taxi driver in Bangkok who cheated him, as he took the long way to the centro storico before delivering me to a restaurant where he tried to negotiate a kickback from the hostess in exchange for bringing me there.
Cinzia Perroni, a professional soprano who has been moonlighting as a tassista for five years, tried to explain the behaviour of her unscrupulous colleagues. "Before, some Roman cab drivers were dishonest because they were stupid," she said. "Now it's out of necessity. There are too many taxis and not enough passengers. But there's something really weird and really fun about this job. And I love to eat!" She wrote down the addresses of seven of her favourite restaurants, including Il Tunnel, where she's been eating risotto alla crema di scampi since she was a girl. "It's the best in Rome," she told me.
I didn't actively seek out female cab drivers in Rome – but they seemed to have the most interesting stories and the best food recommendations. Tassista Laura Piccolo, who studied mathematics before she started the job 12 years ago, was, I thought, a case in point. But as we searched for a trattoria she wanted to show me, she circled the same block three times – and left the meter running. When she found the place, it was closed. Was the cabbie trying to cheat me?
In the end we stopped at Perilli, Piccolo's favourite place for rigatoni alla carbonara. It said €18 on the meter, but she wouldn't take more than 12. "I got lost, honey. You don't have to pay for that!" She handed me her card: "Call me later and tell me if you liked the carbonara."

Layne Mosler is the author of the Taxi Gourmet blog (taxigourmet.com)

Six of the best cabbie-recommended restaurants in Rome

 

Giuseppe Ruzzeto, chef at La Tavernaccia da Bruno. Photograph: Rumen Milkow Pizzeria Remo
A 75-year-old pizzeria considered among the best in Rome, where locals get loud and every pizza is baked to order. Pizza bianca con fiori di zucca (€7.50) is especially good.
• Piazza di Santa Maria Liberatrice, 44, Testaccio (0039 6 574 6270), dinner only. Closed Sun

La Fraschetta del Pesce
A new restaurant where ex-fisherman Marco Magliozzi applies a light touch to the seafood his son delivers daily from their home port of Anzio. The Wednesday €13 crudo and pasta special is great value, but the €20, €30 or €40 menus give a taste of his way with fish.
• Via E d'Arborea, 40-42, Nomentano (0039 6 4424 4818; lafraschettadelpesce.it), lunch and dinner. Closed Mon

La Tavernaccia da Bruno
Sisters Paula and Patrizia Persiani took over this trattoria from their parents in 1991. Chef Giuseppe Ruzzeto (Patrizia's husband) frequently leaves the kitchen to take compliments on his rigatoni alla carbonara (€9) and trippa alla romana (tripe in a delicate tomato sauce, €12).
• Via Panfilo Castaldi, 12, Trastevere (0039 6 581 2792; latavernacciaroma.com), lunch and dinner. Closed Wed

La Nuova Cantinetta
A definitive Roman trattoria nestled between two apartment buildings in the Rococo-inspired Garbatella quarter. Owner Paolo Sanna keeps prices low and tassisti coming back for classics such as rigatoni alla pajata (€6).
• Via Basilio Brollo, 7, Garbatella (0039 6 513 5809), lunch and dinner. Closed Sun
Il Tunnel
Seafood dishes here – such as tassista Cinzia Perroni's favourite risotto alla crema di scampi (€7) – are solid and reasonably priced, but it is their affogato (home-made custard ice cream drizzled with espresso, €6) that merits a cross-town cab ride.
• Via Arezzo, 11, Nomentano (0039 6 4423 6808), lunch and dinner. Closed Mon
Perilli
A favourite of former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni and taxi driver Laura Piccolo, where rigatoni alla carbonara (€13) and abbacchio (Roman spring lamb, €14) are a bit pricey but pitch-perfect.
• Via Marmorata, 39, Testaccio (0039 6 574 2415), lunch and dinner. Closed Wed