Romanè

Via Cipro, 106, 00137 Rome

They told me I was going to Rome, so I called my mate. He has a flat there, his daughter works there, he was at university there, he’s an absolutely colossal foodie. It is an understatement to say I respect his opinion.

“Romanè, he said with reassuringly little pause. I have been recently and it was all very good… But all real food for real locals - so no frills when it comes to service or decoration”.

Sounds good.

“Other places I used to go until recently, he said, have disappointed”

You see why I love him?

You Take the A Train, which I think I’ve wanted to do since Duke Ellington suggested it (and which has infested me since with a fortnight-long ohrwurm.) And you have to get off at Cipro, round the back of the Vatican. It’s a station named after Cyprus and, tangentially, a broad-spectrum antibiotic - Ciprofloxacin - used to treat gonorrhoea, and bubonic plague. I wonder if the Pope’s aware of that.

It’s a wonderfully unassuming spot. It must have been, at least until comparatively recently, some sort of shop front. Obviously the term ‘comparatively recently’ is pretty useless in Rome, but the apartment block of which it forms the base, looks like it was knocked up in the mid Sixties (1960s, you bloody pedant).

Inside, they’ve given it the E8 Makeover (remove unironic fittings with a cold-chisel and roll on a couple of coats of RAL 9016 ‘Traffic White’. Upcycled tables. Institutional chairs) I’m not sure what it says about society when the chairs longer deemed suitable for screwing to the floor of a prison visiting suite are suddenly meet for the arses of the better classes … but hey! There’s a lucrative 1500 in that at some other time.

There are two remarkable decorative themes in the room. First, the largest collection of ‘Buon Ricordo’ plates I’ve ever seen. These things are amazing: joyously primitive ceramics in the ‘Majolica’ tradition, painted with a more enthusiastic than talented hand - or possibly, foot. To give you a cultural cross reference here ‘Buon Ricordo’ means ‘happy memories’, which might in this case be translated as ‘Souvenir of …’ Obviously by the third day in Rome, your art history glands are throbbing like a pit-bull’s scrotum, but there’s no way round the fact that these are naff holiday tat. The problem here is that I’m culturally deracinated. This place is about 200m from the Vatican as the putto flies. That’s the largest single repository of high camp kitsch on the planet. I have to belief that this is a conscious thing. Please…God!

And then there are the doilies. Adorable, cheap paper doilies that your nan would love. I’d heard of them, obviously, but I had to give a talk on royal icing to a WI in Frinton before I ever saw one in the wild.

But here’s the thing. It’s out of the centre, a fairly ordinary suburban street, it’s run by what appears to be a gang of enthusiastic 17yr olds and at 1830, there’s already a queue out the door of young Italian families.

The menu is dead simple - timeless Roman classics, done by keen young Romans

From the starter/nibble end of the menu we order polpette di bollito wherein beef, boiled to death is given CPR by mortadella, potatoes, Parmesan and nutmeg, panéed, fried and served with a green sauce so good, so pure and so verdant that I’ve kept a small vial of it. I shall wear it round my neck, close to my heart, in case, one day, things go tits up and I have to eat a badger.

There was parmagiana di melenzane that looked like 50 shades of beige but tasted smoother than a pastel cashmere, draped artfully over the shoulders of a minor count and Gennargentu. A lovely word, and the most poetic way one could ever imagine to describe fried cheese and jam.

As in all the best Roman joints there’s what one might call ‘the Gastro-Intestinal tract’ - the paragraph on the menu that deals with the inner organs. The ‘quinto quarto’.

The family at the next table were enjoying steaming mounds of trippa alla Romano. Most hearteningly, they were all spooning it into a stout little 2 year old with the kind of curls that would have driven MIchaelangelo to drink (he was, along with most of the painters featured up the Vatican, great at arses, bloody awful at hair. Not sure what that says.)

Later, as the family moved on to other courses and more of the surprisingly agreeable cloudy beige wine, the child was released to wander round the room. Each family table tried to draw her to them with strips of tripe. It was, at one level, adorable, on another, possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in a dining room

I’d had tripe the night before and so considered ‘Coratello D’Abbacchio - heart, lungs, liver, and trachea of suckling lamb, sauteed with olive oil and onions’. I really pondered this one hard. Lots of things went through my head. It was a genuine first-world dilemma. Do I look more like an arse if I order this … or if I don’t? Most noticeably, nobody else seemed to have ordered it - perhaps they knew that strips of warm lung don’t work as child-bait. Most of my culinary inquisitiveness was sidelined as I recalled having once, to do a simulated tracheotomy on a training course. Don’t ask. It was a plastic throat and I remember asking the medic ‘do the real ones crunch like that?’

‘Pretty much, she said, but worse’.

You know what? I’m on bloody holiday. Nobody’s paying me for this. So I had the boiled veal tongue with more of the miracle green sauce. Three slices. And I realised it was quite unlike the ‘ox-tongue’ we serve in the UK - a slab of grey meat the size and texture of a fell-runner’s thigh that nobody ever actually asked for - this is the small soft, pink tongue of a suckling calf and as such, pervertedly sublime.

The ‘Pastascuitta’ section led with an excellent rigatoni alla carbonara - with mirabile dictu, free-range eggs rather than the pasteurised ones they seem to serve everywhere else in the city. Spaghettoni all’ (a)matriciana with guanciale crisp enough to be audible. I want to write separately about the Roman Four pastas (IV pastae?). I got into a couple of kitchens while I was there and consequently have opinions. What was noticeable though was that these were specified in the menu as ’130g servings’.

Any restaurant in Rome that doesn’t hurl English or American tourists back into the street on general principle, is having a pasta problem at the moment. A small serving of one of the four, simple - one might call them ‘emulsion’ pastas, fits beautifully between a starter, and a main that’s just protein. No more carbs required. Maybe a vegetable. But not many people get that.

Everyone feels forced to comment on the oddness of the ‘extra course’ then either goes for one or the other. Even Romanè serves the ragu-based pastas - a meaty gravy over a starch which someone from Peoria or Peterborough can recognise as ‘Proper Dinner’ - in clearly marked 160g portions.

(They do a non-canon but no less splendid Rigatoni con sugo di coda at 130g, but the meat is homeopathic. The flavour is still predominantly tomato, and it’s been saturation bombed with Pecorino so good that mere Parmesan suddenly seems about as damn relevant as Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction)

Saltimbocca was billed as alla Romana so I’m now fixed in my belief that the Romans; like their veal, ham and sage assembled with the structural coherence of a flung trifle. They don’t really ‘jump’ into your mouth. They need to be helped there like getting a duvet into its cover. Taste though? Like putti on a mandoline. Little slices of angel.

And finally, to sit on the evening’s chest and pound its head into the pavement, Polla alla cacciatora (not Romano). A revelation on more levels than a lasagne. The meat, according to the menu, was ‘Thighs and Overthighs’. There’s a joke in there about either a Bond Girl or a lisping tailor, but I’ll leave that one to you. I’ve done enough work already.

The best thing was that whoever had owned the thighs had worked out pretty consistently, possibly, I judged, as a dancer at the Crazy Horse. It was, as they say, no Spring chicken, in fact it was a properly cocky old fowl, cooked back into tenderness in a sauce that contained a surprising amount of vinegar. A completely delicious combination of flavours that had absolutely nothing to do with the sort of turkey bolognese crap that’s been false-flagging it for generations.

I loved every moment of it. Every mouthful, every second. I loved the collapsing saltimbocca, the pervy tongue and the whole weird ‘kid-whisperer’ situation. I loved the souvenirs of Rimini, the doilies.I even loved the brown wine. I only had one glass and it was a weak as rat piss so I’m absolutely positive my judgement wasn’t clouded. This, I said to myself as I climbed back onto the A Train, is why we do this.

Honestly.

Romanè, a perfect bubble of hospitality, is precisely what it’s all about