I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to write an Eating my way Downtown post before. I knew the food in Rome was gonna be good but bruuuuuh, it was on an entirely different level. Let’s do the restaurants first…

If you look up Rome restaurants on tiktok, you won’t be able to scroll far without seeing Osteria da Fortunata and for good reason. This is the place where you can see the pasta being made by hand in the window of the restaurant. The restaurants themselves are simple and rustic but don’t let that fool you – the food is delicious. The menu is pretty large so there is something for everyone with decent veggie options. I had the cacio e pepe and it was easily the best I’ve had in my life, (and I LOVE me some cacio e pepe). The portions are seriously generous and I actually struggled to finish my plate, which is a good problem to have in my opinion. A pasta dish each, 2 sides and 2 soft drinks came to approx. £50 all together. You can’t book, but there are 4 restaurants in Rome, all within easy walking distance of each other, so you shouldn’t have to wait for too long. 

The usual rule is to stay far far away from restaurants near heavy tourist spots as they’re usually a trap with poor quality food for an elevated price. When I learnt Baccano was literally a 2 min walk from the Trevi Foundation, I was stressed but this restaurant proved the point that some rules are made to be broken. The restaurant itself is low lighting and kinda fancy without feeling pretentious or stuffy. There was a mixture of friendly catch ups and date nights, with staff in uniform wizzing around doing up silver service, like weighing out black truffle for diners. On first glance, the menu isn’t the most veggie friendly but they were super happy to make changes to their dishes. We shared a courgette flower parmigiana which was UNREAL, (I genuinely think about this dish often), and a pasta dish each. We ordered the tiramisu for dessert which was put together at our table. It’s such a simple, (slightly gimmicky), thing but not only was it genuinely a delicious tiramisu, but also it made the restaurant so memorable. You can book this one, but the process is a bit weird. My friend had to call and email to get our booking sorted. All in all, (2 starters, 2 mains, 1 dessert and a drink), it came to ~£85 in total.

When we saw celebs like Jeff Bezos and Rosalia had eaten here at Felice a Testaccio, we thought, ‘there’s absolutely no way we can afford this place’, but we were absolutely wrong. The rich & famous don’t go here because it’s fancy dancy, (this was the cheapest dinner we had!), they eat here because the food is really good. They run their dining service in 2 sittings, one at 7 and another one later on in the night. That means there’s a real buzz in the restaurant even right when it opens, which is needed because otherwise it would be very quiet, (there’s no music or anything like that). I believe it started life as a family restaurant and that is still the vibe you can feel. The food came out very quickly which I guess is due to the sittings style dining which meant it wasn’t piping hot. The menu has suggested dishes for each day of the week which is cool but you can obviously just order whatever you want, regardless of the day. In total, our meal which consisted of 2 starters and 2 mains, came up to about £50 each again.

Come back for part 2 for other misc. reccos. (Like bars, gelato places, tiramisu spots, that sort of thing)…