Roman Dinner

So why the hell is it exactly that Italian food made in Italy tastes so damned good? What a bloody good question that is and we determined to try to find out.


Hole in the wall looks like nothing much but damn it was a great lunch and for €50 it should have been. We tasted three white wines suggested by our waiter aft we chose our two wildly varied main courses and took a glass of our preferred two. Then he brought our lunch. Pork loin with a crushed pistachio sauce, weird and delicious along with a cold plate of buffalo smoked meat and mozzarella cheese and a sightly aged buffalo cheese, a first for me.


The Jewish marriage vows include a requirement that all meals be shared, I'm to told and after 20 years of marriage to a pushy Jew I am coming to accept, reluctantly that she may have a point. We picked off each plate marveling at the variety of distinct flavors.


The cliche of Italian life is 'la dolce vita' a cinematic fantasy of life lived in the slow lane with long lunches and lots of nothing much to do. In my experience middle class italians live a life of much stress and a lot of hurrying. We were in vacation mode and thus exempt.


Er Filletaro gets mixed reviews as a tourist trap posing as a local joint but we thoroughly enjoyed the simple cod filets and the more interesting fried zucchini in what can only be described as a tempura-like batter, and a slad of unidentifiable greens with a bizarre anchovy sauce-like dressing. I am no fan of fuzzy fish but it worked and we fought each other for the last drops of sauce to sop up with our bread.


We elected to sit indoors where my wife could watch the action as the cashier doubled as the cold cut slicer in his tiny booth while managing the flow of gossip among the waiters and doling out change for the bills. My wife was entranced by the wine and water dispenser:


And our draught mineral water came in a lovely blue bottle:


We got one glass each so we alternated white wine and water as we ate, a small pour of each at a time.


Find that place without a GPS if you are able. By car? Forget it.


Campo de Fiori is a tourist trap around the corner and why anyone would go here to eat beats me:


I don't go to the one on Duval Street back home, but I'm sure it's all my loss.We took our after dinner stroll along the stalls at the river and we found dried limes?


My wife and I decided they were "interesting" though she preferred licorice among the gazillion flavors on offer. Some dessert!


In many respects I think part of the success of italIan food is attributable to the desire for good ingredients and they cost money. This is not a Walmart way to eat, which is not to say these meals are daily fare for working Italians. In the Jewish quarter we avoided the kosher traps advertising in English and went for the tavola calda a cafeteria style meal for €10 (€1=$1.5). roast chicken hummus and a pita:


With the emphasis on the quality of the ingredients there is less desire to pile a plate high with many flavors which gives a quality dish a purity not found when a meal has meats and cheeses piled high.


Oops, sorry. I came across an elderly Moto Guzzi Airone 250 in daily use and couldn't resist a picture. There are hardly any Moto Guzzis modern or ancient ridden on the streets of Rome which is a shame.


More to the point this is a suppli ("soup-lee") delicious food of my childhood that my great aunt would make for special occasions, a ball of rice infused with tomato sauce wrapped around a piece of cheese, all rolled in bread crumbs and fried so the cheese melts. A ridiculous traditional Roman food. We had it in a restaurant in Trastevere the hip student and tourist quarter of the city where the alleys were crowded with people and the restaurants were second rate. This one, il DuCa was okay but in a land of superlatives not a place we would revisit.


My other childhood favorite is zuppa inglese or "English soup" which is the ItaIian take on a weird English dessert called trifle. I am used to this pudding looking like vanilla and chocolate custard with finger cookies soaked in a
Iiqueur called Alchemenes, which gives it the pink color but instead we got cake which looked odd to my eye but tasted right. Dinner in this loud student hang put was cheap for an appetizer, pasta, veal dish and pudding with house wine and mineral waters- €28 for the lot and no tax or tip to add.


In Ostia Antica we found this old water trough for public use, beautifully preserved, with a roof and evidence of water spigots thoughtfully built in for Roman women or their slaves to collect public water easily without use of rope and bucket.


There it is, intact after 2000 years, in all it's details.


Good food and clean water have mattered around here for a long time.