You can make your pasta and eat it too!
Trip dates: February 11, 2017 - February 17, 2017
When in Rome... eat as the Romans do! Italian culture revolves heavily around food and meals can be several hours as you have starters, followed by a primi course of pasta, then your secondi or main meat course, and then dessert and coffee! And since dinnertime isn't usually until 9pm, there's a lot of snacking throughout the day. Needless to say, we ate a lot in our week here!
Our first couple of days in Rome, we tried out some places close to our Airbnb but sadly, we weren't wowed by the quality of the pasta or the dishes themselves. The food wasn't bad, about on par with any average Italian place back home, but we just expected better since we were actually in Italy! To be fair, the place we ate at the first night had a tourist 3-course menu for only 10 euro (15 euro if you do fish) so... we get what we pay for and all that I guess.
Luckily, Eric had booked some food tours for us (as an awesome Valentine's day present!) so we were able to find really delicious Roman food to fill our bellies for the rest of our time there.
Our second full day in Rome, we started off by doing a food tour through the Campo de Fiori market. This market is a local's market but has become really well-known and touristy, so we don't recommend buying anything here but it's a sight to see and just fun to wander through. As you can see in the pictures below, they have signs in English, as well as several places offering samples and small bottles to take on planes and/or ship to your destination - so local!
We sampled some truffles and olive oil at the market, as well as got introduced to some local produce. This is where we were introduced to the Roman artichokes and puntarelle (aka chicory), which is what we would later search for to find authentic Roman restaurants.
We then went to a cheese shop nearby to try parmesan, pecorino (the poor man's version) and stracciata (which is essentially the creamy yummy insides of a burrata cheese). We also went to a butcher shop for a whole sampling of salamis and other cured pork meats. Eric was in heaven - you seriously got hit in the face with meat smell when you walked in to this place! We wrapped up with some freshly baked pizza before heading to part 2 of the tour: making our own pasta! Nothing like sampling a lot of snacks before a pasta lunch, right?
For lunch, we made a three course meal: spinach and ricotta stuffed raviolis in a butter sage sauce, fettucine in tomato oregano sauce, and tiramisu - all handmade from scratch! We made our tiramisu first so that it could chill and set. We then kneaded our own pasta dough before putting it through the pasta maker to turn into fettucine and raviolis.
Our lunch was served to us in a beautiful dining space and Eric and I oh-so-humbly thought, this is the best meal and pasta that we'd had in Italy so far! We watched Chef Filippo make the sauces and cook the pasta though, so I guess the whole meal wasn't completely made by our own hands. I can't wait to get a pasta maker once we get home so we can try making our own!
Our cooking class and food tour through Campo de Fiori was a combined thing through Walks Inside Rome and we would highly recommend them, especially their cooking class! They also do a pizza making class too. One of the best things about this company is that their group size is really small - our food tour was only the two of us and the cooking class was 5 people.
The other food tour that we did was a twilight tour in Trastevere with Eating Italy. This company is a lot bigger and churns through several tours a day, but we got lucky that Valentine's Day wasn't a popular time slot so our tour was only 6 people total.
Trastevere is a neighborhood across the Tiber River and it is super duper cute! Apparently, the folks that live there like to think of themselves as Trasteverens, not as Romans, and even have an annual festival to celebrate "we-others" (the Festa de' Noantri).
This food tour was absolutely one of the best food tours that I've ever taken, maybe one of the best tours period? Our guide was funny and entertaining, our tour group in general had good chemistry so it was a fun group to spend an evening with. We learned a lot about Trastevere and Rome, and got to eat a ton of delicious delicious food (10 different tastings at 7 locations)!
If you're in Rome and looking for a food tour, we highly recommend Eating Italy - try to get Sarah as your guide!
After successfully eating our way through two food tours, we felt equipped to find better tasting food on our own and so the hunt for great carbonara begun! I looked through countless reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp and finally settled on Felice a Testaccio, in the Testaccio neighborhood (which coincidentally, is kinda right across the Tiber from Trastevere).
Anyways, Eric and I took the metro (it's probably walkable but not after a long day of sightseeing) and got to Felice around 730pm, before Italian prime dinner time. They said that they were completely full and that we could make a reservation for 11pm that night if we wanted. Umm, no thank you.
Luckily, there was another place around the corner that also sounded appealing so we went to Perilli instead. They were pretty busy at the time as well, but the wait staff was friendly enough and asked us to wait about 10minutes to give us a table with reasonable space. The wait was worth it and we had one of our best meals to in Rome yet (aside from our pasta-making lunch of course). If we hadn't had better food our final days in Rome, we would recommend making the trek out to Perilli but as it is, we would only recommend it if you've already eaten at the other places listed below and have spare meals!
We weren't completely wowed by the carbonara at Perilli though we enjoyed the food overall, and I had another place marked on my list that claimed to have the "best carbonara in all of Rome," so we had to go try it out! We went to Osteria del Pegno with our friends Shawn and Amanda for lunch and OMG was that meal amazing! You should absolutely go eat here if you're in Rome - I wish we had time to go back for another meal! Not only was the carbonara amazing but the lasagna was to die for!
After eating that big lunch, Eric and I weren't too hungry so we went to Ai Tre Scalini for dinner, which is a super popular tapas-type place. We got several dishes of smaller quantities and it was a nice break from all the pasta that we had been eating! This place was really crowded when we went, but it seemed like most people were there for drinks so our wait ended up being only 20minutes. It's worth checking out if you're in the area!
The meal at Osteria del Pegno might have been our best meal in Rome... though it's really quite a tough call with the food in Trastevere. Eric and I loved it so much that we basically took Shamanda on an abridged version of the food tour ourselves as our final meal in Rome! And once again, it did not disappoint!
We seriously stuffed our faces in Rome but it was (mostly) all so delicious and worth every calorie! Now that you've had your fill of our meals in Rome, I leave you with some snacks because, what's a food tour of Rome without some pizza and gelato?
