Piazza del Popolo

This may sound shocking, but after the food tour, we headed to lunch. One of us really limited our tasting on the food tour, one of us did not. Anywhoo, lunch was scheduled at Santo Palato, a small trattoria in a working class neighborhood in rome that has become well known for classic Roman dishes made with impeccable technique. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/travel/a-new… We started with a “meatball” of wild boar with a peanut sauce and crostino with pickled scapes. Next was pork neck with the most amazing demi and grilled flat beans and cucumbers; we moved on to quintessential versions of carbonara and amatriciana. We finished with a popover filled with yogurt cream and lightly macerated wild strawberries. It was all divine.

Lunch necessitated an hour long postprandial traipse through the neighborhoods of Rome to the Villa Borghese. We walked through the “gardens”, but tbh everything is very brown, it was nice though. Our hotel backs up to the gardens, so it was very convenient to end there for a little cool down. It was 91f, after all!

After we both took ice cold showers, it was of course appertivo time. We enjoyed the beautiful courtyard scenery with a mint julep for Matt and a Paloma for me. I’d say these were the best concorsils we’ve had, but following this we went to a craft cocktail bar in Trestevre called Freni e Frizioni (https://www.freniefrizioni.com/en/), and I had some sort of watermelon soda concoction that blew my socks off (in terms of flavor, not %etoh). There was a full appertivo buffet, but we (mostly) held strong to build up an appetite for dinner.

[Matt:] After drinks we headed back to Roscioli for dinner, with a quick little detour to walk through a riverside pop-up restaurant/carnival game scene. Cool set up but nothing special. The restaurant space at Roscioli is in their Deli, separate from the Forno/bakery. The Deli counter itself is extensive, filled with meat, fish, cheese and some prepared foods. The walls are lined with wine and liquor bottles, including some harder to find in Italy scotches, vodkas (bottles that we can easily get at home) priced at a significant mark up. Ex: A 5th of Johnny Black was $200.

[Katie: In general, almost every time you look up a review of a restaurant in Italy, they reviewer will say “this is a no frills place”. I have started to laugh at that comment because almost every restaurant is exactly the same. Table cloth (paper vs cloth), placement, regular plates and silverware (a brand new set of EVERYTHING every time you finish a course), glasses… what more frills should there be?? And all the warrants are casual. They just are. You can come dressed up for your night or you can come in your gym shoes from the day and either are fine. We also found the service to be incredibly kind and accommodating in terms of arriving early or late for reservations, menu translation, order we wanted dishes in, etc. Never a bad experience. Ok— back to Matt’s account]

We were seated at the back of the restaurant, behind us was a small family of 4 and both Katie and I recognized the dad [Randy] as one of the 90s pop culture “Sklar brothers”. They had short stints and ESPN and we’re part of the commentary talent on some VH1 shows. He was right in Katie’s view and she was concerned he thought she was staring at him. [I was!! I just wanted to look out but I had to look right at/past him! It was torture.]

Dinner started with a plate of house made meats including the house made salumi (more like a ham), lardo and salami. We also got a massive ball of burrata with house made roasted/dried tomatoes, accompanied by a bread basket (all made at the Forno) with various types of bread. The star bread is their pizza “Bianca” which is basically just pizza dough cooked with some olive oil until crispy on both sides but some how still soft and chewy enough in the middle to easily eat. The little pizza Bianca + burrata/tomato sandwiches you can make were heavenly. For drink we had a bottle of orange wine, which the waiter rolled his eyes at but finally admitted the orange wine he brought us was perfect (if you drink that type of hippie shit). Italians love their tradition and to some that means that wine should be red or white only. We ordered 3 pastas - Cacio Pepe (the star), pomodoro (second star) and butter/anchovy which I (Matt) thought was disgusting but Katie assured me was actually very good. We skipped desert and hoofed it back to the hotel, fighting through throngs of Italian teenagers heading in the exact opposite direction as night two of the concert festival had just let out. Success! [Katie: They had given us a bowl of cherries (Italy has THE BEST cherries) on arrival, so that was my sweet treat before bed 🍒.]Read more