Nonna Betta
NB is a dairy restaurant whose appetizers outshone its entrees, at least in our case. Our appetizers included Suppli (tomato flavored risotto, packed around a hunk of mozzarella cheese, breaded and deep-fried), a salt cod and chickpea soup, and fried artichoke. This last dish is an iconic dish in the Jewish Ghetto, so much so that tourists - Jews and Gentiles alike - flock there to try it. I’ll break them down one by one.
The suppli were luxurious, providing three layers of texture: the crisp outer layer, the creamy starch of well-cooked risotto, and the gooey fat of the cheese center; the flavor itself came mostly from the tomato. Although Rachel is quite the fan of mozzarella, she was not overly taken by the suppli. I could have eaten twelve.
The fried artichoke was delicious, as are most deep-fried starchy vegetables. Given the choice between eating an artichoke fried versus boiled and dipped in mayonnaise, I would easily choose the former ten times out of ten. But both Rachel and I would agree that the fried ‘choke doesn’t beat a good order of fries.
The salt cod (baccala) and chickpea soup was our favorite dish at Nonna Betta, and one of our favorite in all of Rome. Salt cod is kind of like fish jerky, and making it into soup rehydrates the fish, and dilutes its saltiness to palatable levels. At the same time, the salt flavors the otherwise bland chickpeas. The result is a creamy, hearty soup with chunks of fish that are not at all fishy. Since then I have been on a perpetual search for salt cod in Israeli grocery stores, though the closest I could find was a frozen fish called “bakala” which does not appear to be salt cod. (Editor's note: Israeli bakala is Hake, a fish which we tasted while dining with a South African friend; he says every time he sees it in the store, he calls his mom and they buy as much as their freezer can hold)
For entrees, Rachel ordered salmon risotto while I ordered a pizza topped with mozzarella di bufala and tomatoes. I was excited about the cheese, because authentic mozzarella is made with buffalo milk, and authentic is always better, right? Of course not. In this case, the flavor of the cheese ranked higher than standard mozz in terms of sophistication (read: funk), but it didn’t ooze and flow like a good NY slice. The true stars of the pizza were those little chunks of tomato; sweet to begin with, the blistering heat of the pizza oven caused these guys to reduce and concentrate their sweet, tart goodness. The crust was disappointing due to being cracker thin - I find such crusts lack both taste and texture.
Rachel’s risotto was definitely good, although there was barely any salmon flavor in it. Not worth the extra euros, we decided. But, salmon or not, the creamy, silky, heavenly godfood that is risotto absolutely must be sampled in its country of origin.
La Taverna del Ghetto
Of the dozen or so kosher restaurants in Rome’s Jewish Ghetto, La Taverna del Ghetto is the most expensive. It also supposedly has a reputation among tourists in general, not just the Jewish ones. Neither of these convinced me that La Taverna would have the best food, but they did convince me to save it for Monday night, Rachel’s birthday.
While we enjoyed her birthday, the food itself did not justify the price nor the reputation. Our meal began with a waitress bringing out an incredibly odd appetizer - a plate containing a portion of bean stew with... two shards of matzah (straight out of the box). In the words of the less tactful Israeli couple sitting next to us, since it wasn’t Pesach what business did they have serving us Matzah?
This question would never be answered. However, I did order a real appetizer - another salt cod dish, this time baked with raisins and some other tasty things I can’t recall. Rachel and I shared this dish and enjoyed it, although it wasn’t as elegant an application of cod as was the previous day’s soup. The fish had a good texture, and it wasn’t too salty, but at the same time there wasn’t much flavor present other than the salt.
For our main course, I ordered the lamb with garlic and parsley (“Jewish style”), while Rachel ordered the bucatini (that’s thick spaghetti with a hollow center) with a meat sauce. The pasta, as was all our subsequent pasta in Rome, was cooked perfectly, and had less sauce and meat than one would expect by American standards. The lamb was tasty, but I found myself searching for meat among the bones, as I often do when eating lamb. And when I say tasty, I mean in the unremarkable sort of way.
We wanted to order tiramisu for dessert, but they were out of that. In fact, they were out of everything other than pistachio torte. It was probably just as well that we didn’t have to suffer through a bland foux-dairy tiramisu, and the pistachio torte was actually delicious. Between that torte and a pistachio gelato that we had twice, I’d say Italy is a fine place for that little green nut.
Ba Ghetto Milky
Ba Ghetto is a meat restaurant, and Ba Ghetto Milky is its dairy sister. Both are usually pretty crowded, which is often the best sign for quality. Here we once again ordered the fried artichoke, as well as a dish of anchovies and spinach.
The fried artichoke was a dud. The leaves were ok, but the inside was full of that dastardly artichoke fuzz that cannot be eaten (I’ve since learned that it will accumulate inside your insides and create a bezoar... yeah, I also thought bezoars only existed in Harry Potter...).
But, oh the anchovies! They were fresh, not canned and smelly. Combined with the cooked spinach and dripping with good olive oil and salt, the fish was full of flavor, meaty texture, and unctuous oils. In case you haven’t gotten the message, the thing to order in Rome is fish!
For entrees, I ordered gnocchi with a tomato sauce and gooey mozzarella, while Rachel ordered pasta with mushrooms, cheese and truffles. The resulting explosion of umami delighted Rachel at first, but eventually got the best of her. Good thing I was there to finish the job. The gnocchi was comfort food to the max - carbs loaded with sauce and cheese. I’d actually never really had it before, only read about it. It was indeed soft and pillowy (the most popular adjective used to describe gnocchi, by the way), with just enough chew.
Here we got some real tiramisu for dessert and, although the portion was small, it was delicious, especially alongside one of those teeny tiny espressos.
A note pertaining to all these restaurants: you get charged for bread, so if you don’t want to pay for it, don’t ask for it and if they bring it out tell them you don’t want it. Water might be free, but you definitely pay for it when it comes with “gas” (carbonated). We loved the water with gas, and were perfectly happy to spend a little extra to dine with bubbles.
Ba Ghetto Meat
This restaurant gets a truncated review, because I really don’t remember much of what we ate here. The food wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t memorable, and that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I remember Rachel ordered a totally ordinary vegetable soup, and we each ate some kind of pasta as a main course. The pasta was cooked perfectly, and contained some salty meat and tomatoes, but I don’t remember exactly. It is as boring for me to think about as it is for you to read about.
Pane al Pane
We went to this bakery three times; once to get rolls, once to have breakfast, and once for pizza. I wish we’d gotten the pizza all three times. In fact, the only thing stopping me from ordering pizza for breakfast on the second visit was the fear that I’d be committing a major faux pas. Turns out the joke was on me, because after settling on a pastry for my morning repast, I saw subsequent patrons walking away with those very slices my eyes had coveted!
Pane al Pane bakes pizza in large, oval pies on a crust that is thin, but still chewy and flavorful. They sell it by weight, which I think is marvelous. You are totally free to deviate from the standard slice unit; you can order a lot, a little, or something in between. You can order a piece with lots of crust or barely any. Ultimate flexibility. I imagine this is how pizza is sold all over Rome (probably Italy in general), but I’m not sure. We picked four different toppings to taste, and enjoyed every single one.
First was a mushroom pizza, which, with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and mushrooms, was the closest of the four to a standard American slice.
Next was a pizza with some kind of cheese and thin dry strips of salty anchovies (maybe there was some kind of vegetable too, but I just remember the fish). I don’t know why the Ninja Turtles hated them, but we both liked them.
Third was Rachel’s favorite: a pie with white, round, ultra-thin slices of potato with a tiny bit of cheese. We weren’t even sure what it was until we tasted it, but it was decidedly fantastic. The thing is, starch-on-starch pizza doesn’t sound so good in theory. It seems heavy and unappetizing. I’ve only seen such pizzas executed in a clumsy and hideous fashion - I’m thinking of the baked ziti pizza at the place back home.. ugh. But with this pie the creamy potato contrasts the chewy crust, plus there isn’t much potato to begin with. I can’t wait to recreate it at home.
The fourth pizza was covered with what I thought was broccoli, and I took a big bite. The next instant I experienced one of the most intense tastes of my life, easily my most vivid food memory from all of Italy. The pizza was covered not with broccoli, but with roasted Italian chilies. The heat of the chilies hit me like an electric shock, but it was the good kind of heat - full of vinegar, sweetness, and smoky char. My mouth waters just thinking about it.
NB is a dairy restaurant whose appetizers outshone its entrees, at least in our case. Our appetizers included Suppli (tomato flavored risotto, packed around a hunk of mozzarella cheese, breaded and deep-fried), a salt cod and chickpea soup, and fried artichoke. This last dish is an iconic dish in the Jewish Ghetto, so much so that tourists - Jews and Gentiles alike - flock there to try it. I’ll break them down one by one.
The suppli were luxurious, providing three layers of texture: the crisp outer layer, the creamy starch of well-cooked risotto, and the gooey fat of the cheese center; the flavor itself came mostly from the tomato. Although Rachel is quite the fan of mozzarella, she was not overly taken by the suppli. I could have eaten twelve.
The fried artichoke was delicious, as are most deep-fried starchy vegetables. Given the choice between eating an artichoke fried versus boiled and dipped in mayonnaise, I would easily choose the former ten times out of ten. But both Rachel and I would agree that the fried ‘choke doesn’t beat a good order of fries.
The salt cod (baccala) and chickpea soup was our favorite dish at Nonna Betta, and one of our favorite in all of Rome. Salt cod is kind of like fish jerky, and making it into soup rehydrates the fish, and dilutes its saltiness to palatable levels. At the same time, the salt flavors the otherwise bland chickpeas. The result is a creamy, hearty soup with chunks of fish that are not at all fishy. Since then I have been on a perpetual search for salt cod in Israeli grocery stores, though the closest I could find was a frozen fish called “bakala” which does not appear to be salt cod. (Editor's note: Israeli bakala is Hake, a fish which we tasted while dining with a South African friend; he says every time he sees it in the store, he calls his mom and they buy as much as their freezer can hold)
For entrees, Rachel ordered salmon risotto while I ordered a pizza topped with mozzarella di bufala and tomatoes. I was excited about the cheese, because authentic mozzarella is made with buffalo milk, and authentic is always better, right? Of course not. In this case, the flavor of the cheese ranked higher than standard mozz in terms of sophistication (read: funk), but it didn’t ooze and flow like a good NY slice. The true stars of the pizza were those little chunks of tomato; sweet to begin with, the blistering heat of the pizza oven caused these guys to reduce and concentrate their sweet, tart goodness. The crust was disappointing due to being cracker thin - I find such crusts lack both taste and texture.
Rachel’s risotto was definitely good, although there was barely any salmon flavor in it. Not worth the extra euros, we decided. But, salmon or not, the creamy, silky, heavenly godfood that is risotto absolutely must be sampled in its country of origin.
La Taverna del Ghetto
Of the dozen or so kosher restaurants in Rome’s Jewish Ghetto, La Taverna del Ghetto is the most expensive. It also supposedly has a reputation among tourists in general, not just the Jewish ones. Neither of these convinced me that La Taverna would have the best food, but they did convince me to save it for Monday night, Rachel’s birthday.
While we enjoyed her birthday, the food itself did not justify the price nor the reputation. Our meal began with a waitress bringing out an incredibly odd appetizer - a plate containing a portion of bean stew with... two shards of matzah (straight out of the box). In the words of the less tactful Israeli couple sitting next to us, since it wasn’t Pesach what business did they have serving us Matzah?
This question would never be answered. However, I did order a real appetizer - another salt cod dish, this time baked with raisins and some other tasty things I can’t recall. Rachel and I shared this dish and enjoyed it, although it wasn’t as elegant an application of cod as was the previous day’s soup. The fish had a good texture, and it wasn’t too salty, but at the same time there wasn’t much flavor present other than the salt.
For our main course, I ordered the lamb with garlic and parsley (“Jewish style”), while Rachel ordered the bucatini (that’s thick spaghetti with a hollow center) with a meat sauce. The pasta, as was all our subsequent pasta in Rome, was cooked perfectly, and had less sauce and meat than one would expect by American standards. The lamb was tasty, but I found myself searching for meat among the bones, as I often do when eating lamb. And when I say tasty, I mean in the unremarkable sort of way.
We wanted to order tiramisu for dessert, but they were out of that. In fact, they were out of everything other than pistachio torte. It was probably just as well that we didn’t have to suffer through a bland foux-dairy tiramisu, and the pistachio torte was actually delicious. Between that torte and a pistachio gelato that we had twice, I’d say Italy is a fine place for that little green nut.
Ba Ghetto Milky
Ba Ghetto is a meat restaurant, and Ba Ghetto Milky is its dairy sister. Both are usually pretty crowded, which is often the best sign for quality. Here we once again ordered the fried artichoke, as well as a dish of anchovies and spinach.
The fried artichoke was a dud. The leaves were ok, but the inside was full of that dastardly artichoke fuzz that cannot be eaten (I’ve since learned that it will accumulate inside your insides and create a bezoar... yeah, I also thought bezoars only existed in Harry Potter...).
But, oh the anchovies! They were fresh, not canned and smelly. Combined with the cooked spinach and dripping with good olive oil and salt, the fish was full of flavor, meaty texture, and unctuous oils. In case you haven’t gotten the message, the thing to order in Rome is fish!
For entrees, I ordered gnocchi with a tomato sauce and gooey mozzarella, while Rachel ordered pasta with mushrooms, cheese and truffles. The resulting explosion of umami delighted Rachel at first, but eventually got the best of her. Good thing I was there to finish the job. The gnocchi was comfort food to the max - carbs loaded with sauce and cheese. I’d actually never really had it before, only read about it. It was indeed soft and pillowy (the most popular adjective used to describe gnocchi, by the way), with just enough chew.
Here we got some real tiramisu for dessert and, although the portion was small, it was delicious, especially alongside one of those teeny tiny espressos.
A note pertaining to all these restaurants: you get charged for bread, so if you don’t want to pay for it, don’t ask for it and if they bring it out tell them you don’t want it. Water might be free, but you definitely pay for it when it comes with “gas” (carbonated). We loved the water with gas, and were perfectly happy to spend a little extra to dine with bubbles.
Ba Ghetto Meat
This restaurant gets a truncated review, because I really don’t remember much of what we ate here. The food wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t memorable, and that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I remember Rachel ordered a totally ordinary vegetable soup, and we each ate some kind of pasta as a main course. The pasta was cooked perfectly, and contained some salty meat and tomatoes, but I don’t remember exactly. It is as boring for me to think about as it is for you to read about.
Pane al Pane
We went to this bakery three times; once to get rolls, once to have breakfast, and once for pizza. I wish we’d gotten the pizza all three times. In fact, the only thing stopping me from ordering pizza for breakfast on the second visit was the fear that I’d be committing a major faux pas. Turns out the joke was on me, because after settling on a pastry for my morning repast, I saw subsequent patrons walking away with those very slices my eyes had coveted!
Pane al Pane bakes pizza in large, oval pies on a crust that is thin, but still chewy and flavorful. They sell it by weight, which I think is marvelous. You are totally free to deviate from the standard slice unit; you can order a lot, a little, or something in between. You can order a piece with lots of crust or barely any. Ultimate flexibility. I imagine this is how pizza is sold all over Rome (probably Italy in general), but I’m not sure. We picked four different toppings to taste, and enjoyed every single one.
First was a mushroom pizza, which, with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and mushrooms, was the closest of the four to a standard American slice.
Next was a pizza with some kind of cheese and thin dry strips of salty anchovies (maybe there was some kind of vegetable too, but I just remember the fish). I don’t know why the Ninja Turtles hated them, but we both liked them.
Third was Rachel’s favorite: a pie with white, round, ultra-thin slices of potato with a tiny bit of cheese. We weren’t even sure what it was until we tasted it, but it was decidedly fantastic. The thing is, starch-on-starch pizza doesn’t sound so good in theory. It seems heavy and unappetizing. I’ve only seen such pizzas executed in a clumsy and hideous fashion - I’m thinking of the baked ziti pizza at the place back home.. ugh. But with this pie the creamy potato contrasts the chewy crust, plus there isn’t much potato to begin with. I can’t wait to recreate it at home.
The fourth pizza was covered with what I thought was broccoli, and I took a big bite. The next instant I experienced one of the most intense tastes of my life, easily my most vivid food memory from all of Italy. The pizza was covered not with broccoli, but with roasted Italian chilies. The heat of the chilies hit me like an electric shock, but it was the good kind of heat - full of vinegar, sweetness, and smoky char. My mouth waters just thinking about it.
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