Author: Rory O'Keeffe

Pastificio | Spanish Steps | €4 + wine (!) (you eat standing up)

Only a few steps from where John Keats died (author of ‘Ode on a Gricia Urn’), Pastificio has a queue outside that is permanently full with about an 8:2 ratio of tourists to Romans. The two choices – red or white sauce – change every day so I kept going back time after time hoping they would be doing a Gricia. It took me 20 visits. Pretty sure there was a hairy piece of bacon in mine. 2 Colosseums.

Trattoria Pigneto | Pigneto | €7

Another place in hipster Pigneto, this time with our friend Paolo who ordered Spaghetti alla Grica while I ordered Rigatoni alla Gricia. ‘He’s going to kill us!’ said Paolo. ‘Ordering the same dish with two different pasta shapes!’ He did not kill us. 3 Colosseums.

Da Otello | Trastevere | €9

One day my flatmate asked if I had considered googling ‘best Gricia in Rome’. I said of course I had, do you think I’m some kind of idiot? He replied: ‘But have you googled it *in Italian*? Fair point. Da Otello appeared on every Italian list of best Gricia, and with good reason. I took an English friend who had only recently tried hummus at the age of 29. These fussy eaters, I can’t stand them. Anyway, his mind was blown. Mine too, a bit. But ultimately the guanciale was too fatty. 3 Colosseums.

Da Enzo | Trastevere | €9

I first came to Rome with my girlfriend 3 years ago on holiday. Trusting several recommendations, we ate at ‘Da Enzo’ and the pasta was so good that we ordered ‘secondi’. Ordering halfway through our meal meant the waiters accidentally left our second course off the bill. I only realised that we’d underpaid by a cool 20 euros when we were one hundred yards away from the restaurant. We had a decision to make – carry on as if we hadn’t realised, or do the moral thing, turn back, and pay the extra money. I have little advice when it comes to love but I will say this: find someone who looks at you with an expression that says ‘Obviously we’re not going back to pay the money’.

We were now fugitives and that secret bound us together for another three years, after which we came back to Rome, this time for a whole year. We returned to Da Enzo, the scene of the crime, but miraculously there was no ‘Wanted’ sign with a picture of our faces on the wall. We ate there several times throughout the year with various visitors. It’s good, but it’s still just another dry pasta Gricia. 3.5 Colosseums.

 

Al Simeto | Salaria | €10

Roman meals tend to be massive, but Al Simeto is something else. They serve portions like they’ve just been told there’s going to be no-deal Brexit  food shortages. It helped that I had walked 8km across an incredibly windy Rome to reach this place. My French flatmates Melanie and Antoine foolishly ordered variations of Cacio and Pepe, while I spotted that they made Gricia with an extra ingredient: Artichokes. Artichokes are a big deal in Rome. There are two ways of doing them – Roman style, and Jewish style, the latter of which is delicious and crispy and fried. Gricia with Carciofi is an incredible combo. I would have given it 5 colosseums if possible, but any extra ingredient counts as cheating. A few nights before returning to England, when I had to choose the location of my last Gricia in Rome, I chose this place. 4 Colosseums.

Bologna is so renowned for its culinary credentials that it is nicknamed ‘la grassa’ (‘the fat one’). It’s the home of ‘ragu bolognese’, the dish that the British violate so badly that it causes Gino D’Acampo to have regular pre-planned meltdowns on GMTV for viral purposes. The region also lays claim to mortadella, tortellini, parma ham, parmesan, and lasagne. So what did I go in search for? Obviously a Gricia.

In Bologna, I had more luck than Venice. We found ‘Pistamentuccia’, a restaurant specifically dedicated to Roman cuisine. Again, I cannot stress how weird this is for Johnny Englander. The Bologna folk were in a packed restaurant trying an ‘exotic’ cuisine from a place only two hours away by train. Like trendy Londoners queuing up in Soho for some traditional East Anglian food.

We sat down and the placemat immediately told me I was in the right place. A pictorial diagram explaining the differences between the main Roman pasta dishes: Cacio e pepe is cheese and pepper. Add guanciale it’s a Gricia. Add tomato it’s Amatriciana or add egg and it’s Carbonara:

The best thing about this diagram is Look. What’s. In. The. Middle. A simple flow chart like this proves my entire year-long purpose: Gricia is at the heart of everything. It is Roman pasta in its simplest form and that’s why it’s the best. You hear that Carbonara fans? Get your fucking egg out of my Gricia.

I turned to my long-suffering girlfriend who has eaten far more gricias than she would care for and said: ‘This is the place. I bet they’ll do gricia how I like it’.

How I like it is how it’s done by aforementioned Pasta Remoli, Finsbury Park. Short, fresh pasta. Romans tend to make Gricia with long, fresh pasta (spaghetti, tonnarelli) OR short, packet pasta (rigatoni). And by ‘tend to’ I mean these are the two options and this strict rule must never be broken under penalty of death in the Colosseum.

I asked the waiter in Italian if the Gricia came with long pasta. He said yes, fresh tonnarelli. I asked if he could do short fresh pasta. He seemed confused but not unwilling and said something about my sleeves. I said thank you, I had rolled them up especially. He meant ‘mezze maniche’, the popular pasta shape of ‘half-sleeves’. Somewhere in this confusion he took my order.

My girlfriend, fluent in French and Spanish, sometimes effortlessly understands Italian better than me even though I have about a 4 year head start on her. She informed me I had misunderstood the waiter and I was getting short pasta from the packet. “No, no, he understood.” I said. “Trust me. My Italian is better than yours. You don’t even know the imperfect subjunctive.”

The waiter arrived with my short pasta from the packet.

The dish was probably a four Colosseums but my disappointment and wounded pride made it a 3. When outside of Rome, don’t do as the Romans do. Stick to Bolognese.

Restaurant: ★★★ | Pasta: ★★★ | Pepper: ★ ★★|  Cheese: ★★★ | Guanciale (‘pork cheek’): ★★★| OVERALL: 3/5 Colosseums

Recently I received this message from a friend:

It’s nice to know my blog has found a curious but ultimately confused audience. I replied, asking him where he was going. Venice, he said, and I regrettably informed him that he was unlikely to find a Gricia in Venice. Or anywhere outside of Rome, for that matter. Like everything else in Italy, the cuisine is intensely regional. Mozzarella is from Campania, pesto is from Genova, and if you’re having a pizza it better be from fucking Naples. This concept is alien to anyone from England. No one has ever said ‘I could really go for some Mancunian food right now!’ or ‘Oh, in summer, you simply have to visit Nottingham. The food is amazing.’

Last week, I was also in Venice, chaperoning a 12-year-old tutee to museums that he did not find interesting. Eventually I gave up and took him to the park where we played basketball against two random 8-year-old Italians. We lost heavily. Halfway through the trip the boy’s mother returned to Rome unexpectedly, leaving me in sole charge of a child for 72 hours. I would have to feed him. Several times. Naturally he is aware of my Gricia obsession so we started to seek it out, checking the menu at every restaurant we swam past (cannot recommend swimming around Venice enough – the fine is only 450 euros). No Gricias anywhere. In Venice, they eat Venetian food. Or rather, they charge non-Venetians a fortune to eat Venetian food. But, on the third day, I stumbled upon a bin. A bin with a sign on directing us to a ‘Conad’. The miracle of national supermarkets! They would surely have Gricia ingredients (‘Ingricia-ents’).

I rushed in, thrusting a big basket into the tiny hands of the boy and running to the meat counter to ask if they had guanciale. The woman said something in Italian involving the word ‘sì’, so I asked for 100g. I shouted to the boy – ‘find pecorino romano!’. While she cut the slices of meat, he scoured the cheese aisle and said there was none. What an idiot I was to ask a child; he doesn’t have the concentration skills to find the cheese. I pushed him aside, scanning the shelves: Parmesan, Grana Padano, Provolone. No Pecorino Romano. They didn’t have it. Normally on principle I would abandon the project. But I had a child to feed. I said ‘no worries, we’ll use parmesan’, silently begging forgiveness from the patron saint of Italian recipes (St Stubborno Tradizionale, if you’re interested).

When we reached home, I looked at the ‘guanciale’. It was a weird mix between parma ham and fat. I realised in hindsight that my Italian wasn’t good enough to work out what else the woman had said when she replied ‘sì.’ ‘It smells weird,’ said the 12-year-old. I assured him it would be better once cooked.

It was officially the worst Gricia I have ever made. The meat tasted slimy and weirdly flavoured, the parmesan was parmesan, not pecorino. Not even the pepper was good. The boy ate some of the pasta and left the chunks of suspect meat untouched. ‘How is it?’ I asked. ‘I miss my Mum,’ he said. 1 Colosseum.

Restaurant: N/A (Cost of ingricia-ents: €4.37) | Pasta: ★★ | Pepper: ★ ★|  Cheese: N/A | Guanciale (‘pork cheek’): N/A | OVERALL: 1/5 Colosseums

Restaurant: ★★★★| Pasta: ★★★ | Pepper: ★ ★|  Cheese: ★★★ | Guanciale (‘pork cheek’): ★★★★ | OVERALL: 3.5/5 Colosseums

Gricia is the complete opposite of Brexit. With Brexit, no one knows what they want. With Gricia, everyone knows what they want. They want a Gricia. In Britain, people keep asking ‘shall we have a second referendum?’. In Rome, people keep asking ‘shall we have a second gricia?’ And the answer is always yes.

In an effort to escape the absurd and embarrassing nature of British politics, I have been focusing on the absurd and embarrassing nature of Italian politics. Britain might be having its moment right now, but at most times throughout post-war history, Italian politics could quite easily look at Britain and say ‘Hold my Aperol Spritz’.

Britain: omg it’s so crazy, the government whipped to vote against themselves!

Italy: a left-wing terrorist group have kidnapped and killed a former prime minister.

Anyway, the main thing we all want to know about Italian politics is where do Roman politicians eat their Gricia? Apparently, at Da Mario. Tipped off my a well-connected friend of mine (read into that clause as many mafia jokes as you like), I made my way to this very central restaurant, close to the Pantheon, and close to both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies.

I ordered a Gricia and tried to spot some famous influential politicians. The problem is I don’t know any. I kept looking around at people in suits and wondering who the hell they were. Was the old man sipping soup the Italian equivalent of Jacob Rees-Mogg? Maybe he was speaking Latin and not Italian. Was the waiter coming over and asking me to ‘order’ doing a John Bercow impression?

The food was good, but I ate it in fear that I was about to be caught up in some sort of political scandal. Having watched all of Suburra and Gomorrah, it was hard to enjoy the crispy guanciale while half-expecting a man on a motorbike to burst into the restaurant and say something sinister and vague like ‘don’t forget who’s paying for that Gricia’. Except without subtitles to help me.

It was 9 euros. Or, to use the new post-Brexit exchange rate, 20 pounds. Maybe it’s time the mafia started bankrolling this blog…

Restaurant: ★★ | Pasta: ★ | Pepper: ★ |  Cheese: ★ | Guanciale (‘pork cheek’): ★ | OVERALL: 1/5 Colosseums

With the exception of long term romantic partners, if you love something you want to share it. So I often encourage people to eat my culinary love Gricia. This can horrifically backfire. Some wounds need time to heal. The incident in question took place in Ottabrata Romana (the Roman phrase for how sunny it still is in October). It is now Februarino Romano McColdWind (not a phrase) and I have only just emotionally recovered enough to recount the tale.

My old university friend was in town with a few of her friends; she had read my first blog on Gricia. The perils of fame. Now everyone in her group wanted to try this mystical dish, ‘the Gricia’. What pasta could be so good that a fully grown 28-year-old man would move to Rome just to spend most of his time eating it and writing about it, unpaid?! So we all went out for dinner. Including me and my girlfriend, it was a table for five. Let’s call the others Friend 1, Friend 2, and Friend 3 to preserve their anonymity. Now let’s completely ruin that with a picture showing each of their faces clearly:

We were at VyTA , recommended to my old university friend  by someone who had lived in Rome 8 years ago. I think the restaurant had changed management since then. Perhaps this was a sign. Gricia was not officially on the menu. Perhaps this was another sign. But Gricia is often less widely available compared to its Roman brothers Cacio e Pepe, Amatriciana, and Carbonara. This Holy Trinity look down on Gricia, presumably for its simplicity and its shameless belief that putting more saltiness into a dish is always a good idea.

My friends were crushed that Gricia wasn’t on the menu so I turned to the waiter and in broken Italian asked him if he could make a Gricia. He said ‘perché no?’ I had no answer. Of course, why not? 5 gricias, please! (Actually it was only 3 and people shared but you’ll forgive the embellishment.)

The Gricias arrive. Everyone beams with anticipation, my friends proud that they had been given an authentic off-the-menu Roman dish. Friend 1 takes her first bite. “It’s salty.” Friend 2 agrees. “Yeah…er…wow. Really salty.”

Why do they have such a problem with the Gricia? I look at my own plate and see the problem. Cheese, yes. Black pepper, yes. Rigatoni, great pasta shape. But the pork cheek, Oh my lord, what is that?! The guanciale is in cubes. CUBES! This is not the correct shape for pork cheek. How in the Holy Pope did it come out as a cube? The pieces have more corners than the Square Colosseum. I take a bite and I have a thought completely unfamiliar to me: there is such a thing as too salty. And this is it.

“It really is very salty,” reiterates Friend 2 as Friend 1 pushes some pieces of meat around with her fork.

“It’s supposed to be salty, don’t worry,” I say, trying to salvage the night.

“Can we have some more water, please?” Friend 3 asks the waiter.

I take another bite. This meat is gross. The cheese and pepper do their best – ‘don’t taste the meat, think about us! We’re still good!’. It’s useless. My friends sense my panic; they don’t want to offend the man who seems to be in love with a pasta dish.

“Actually I think it’s quite good,” says Friend 2, shovelling thick pieces of disgusting meat into his mouth. “Yeah. It’s interesting,” says Friend 3.

“It’s…it’s not normally like this,” I stutter. I consider making a complaint to the waiter and then I remember I’m British so I would literally explode with embarrassment if I tried. The meal proceeds in silence. They do not finish their Gricias.