Food & drink
How to eat well in Rome without ending up on a tourist menu
The rules are simple, well known to Romans, and reliably filter out the places built for people passing through once.
Rome has excellent food and a significant quantity of restaurants that exist purely to serve people who will never return. Telling them apart is not difficult once you know what to look for. A menu translated into six languages, photographs of the dishes, or a person outside inviting you in are each, on their own, enough to keep walking.
A short handwritten menu that changes is the strongest positive signal. Roman cooking is built on a small number of dishes done precisely: cacio e pepe, carbonara, amatriciana and gricia are variations on the same few ingredients, and a kitchen that does them well does everything well. Order them where they belong - in a trattoria, not a place that also offers pizza, risotto and lasagne.
Pizza in Rome is thin and crisp, distinct from the Neapolitan style, and the al taglio shops selling it by weight are often better than sit-down restaurants. Coffee is drunk standing at the bar, where it costs a fraction of table service, and cappuccino after mid-morning marks you out instantly but nobody will actually mind.
Finally, walk ten minutes away from any major sight before choosing. The correlation between distance from the Pantheon and quality of lunch is close to linear.
