The global culinary fame of Italy’s third largest city boils down to one word: pizza. You can hardly throw a tomato in the food’s alleged birthplace — a rambling, graffiti-spotted port city of monumental Baroque buildings and narrow cobbled lanes — without hitting a throng of culinary pilgrims fighting to get into one of the hundreds (or thousands, some count. ) of pizzerias.
But many top trattorias, osterias, and ristoranti exist alongside pizza titans such as Sorbillo and Da Michele. Drawing on the cornucopia of animals and produce from the fertile fields and coastal waters of the Campania region — cows, goats, shellfish, wheat, artichokes, zucchini, figs, citrus fruits and more — these eateries prepare of local inventions from mussel soup to homegrown. pasta to limoncello.
So when you’re ready to venture beyond the crowded dens of dough and red sauce, here are five addresses in five neighborhoods that offer both traditional and creative takes on beloved Neapolitan recipes and ingredients. Bon appetit
History covers it homey, family-run restaurant hidden in the tight grid of streets that make up the working-class district of Quartieri Spagnoli, a hillside zone where laundry seems to hang from every rusted iron balcony.
As opera arias and sentimental Italian ballads echo across the swirling, hand-painted, 18th-century wall tiles, a succession of time-honored Neapolitan dishes make their way from the open kitchen to the ruins -broken wooden table, where the mostly Italian clientele gobbled them up: fried eggplant, fried cucumber, fried rice balls, lots of meatballs and ziti under generous ladles of thick, tomato-beef Neapolitan ragù (sold also in jars for 8.50 euros, or about $9.25).
The seafood offerings are equally worthy, including tender anchovies and cod drenched in a thick sauce of tomatoes, capers and olives. For a coda, you can balance salty with sweet thanks to a sticky baba au rhum – a favorite Franco-Polish dessert adopted in Napoli in the 18th century.
Osteria della Mattonella, By Giovanni Nicotera 13. A three-course meal costs around 25 euros per person.
Tripperia O’Russ
Centuries ago, women from the lower classes of Naples gathered outside royal residences in the hope of being provided with the discarded entrails of animals slaughtered for aristocratic banquets.
These days, you only have to go to one of the city’s tripe restaurants to taste this timeless favorite, traditionally referred to as cucina povera — the food of the poor — made in a variety of ways from pig’s foot, cow’s snout and cow’s belly.
Started as a pushcart business in 1945, Tripperia O’Russ a simple, bright white dining room on a middle-class residential street near the city’s botanical gardens has been occupied for decades, earning a reputation as Naples’ premier tripe temple. Amidst the sound of hacking, a mix of locals from all walks of life gather to eat simple soups, pastas and stews filled with slow-cooked offal.
The Tris Trippa sampler, perfect for the uninitiated, is a trio of tripe preparations: with potatoes and a thin sauce of olive oil, onions, peppers and tomatoes; with heavy tomato sauce; and with a mixture of tomato sauce and beans. Those with bolder palates can enjoy carpaccio-ish slices of cooked veal tripe served only with a lemon wedge. The restaurant doesn’t serve desserts, but large bottles of Peroni beer (2.50 euros) complement the onslaught.
Despite its simple decor and location in the historic center of Naples, this cozy and popular place is no relic. Full of craft beers (including a mild, easy-drinking house IPA) and a second menu of gluten-free options, the four-year-old restaurant is run by a young and tattooed staff and serves a clientele of renowned international foodies.
Still, the polite, old-school menu will make your Neapolitan grandmother smile with recognition of items like eggplant parmigiana and pasta with potatoes and provolone cheese.
Among the antipasti, mozzarella in carrozza shows that the classic Campania cheese can be melted into delicious variations that do not require a pizza oven. Heated until tender and spread on thick slices of toasted bread dipped in egg, mozzarella becomes the star of a bubbly, gooey sandwich. Cheese makes another cameo in crispy fried paccheri – a beloved Neapolitan noodle stuffed with a combination of tomato sauce, beef, pork, lard, raisins, pine nuts and mozzarella.
If you can (and it will be a challenge), save room for meaty, tomato sauce-soaked chunks of rabbit cacciatore – a favorite dish from the nearby island of Ischia.
La Locanda Gesù Vecchio, By Giovanni Paladino 26. A three-course meal costs around 30 euros per person.
Seafront Pasta Bar
A lot of onions and a lot of time. Those are the secrets to Genovese sauce, a specialty of Naples despite the name coming from Genoa. Made primarily from finely sliced onions — slow-cooked over low heat for several hours — along with olive oil and tender cuts of beef, the sauce is so emblematic of Naples that it probably deserves a towering monument in grand plaza that the restaurant overlooks. , Piazza Municipio.
Chunky, chewy ziti with Genovese sauce is just one of the delicious noodles created in Seafront Pasta Bara minimalist Scandinavian-chic dining room above the boutique for Di Martino pasta maker, who also runs a restaurant. Like the ziti, the dry noodles sold in the store and served on top are made at the company’s factory in the nearby town of Gragnano, a pasta mecca in Italy thanks to its long history of pasta production and the many top brands based still there.
Rich local flavors also combine in spaghetti alle vongole — a swirl of buttery noodles topped with soft, sweet clams and charred garlic that comes under a glass dome of olive-oil smoke — and bucatini with Ischia -inspired tomato sauce containing tender shredded. rabbit
Noodles even contribute to some desserts, especially “pastamisù,” a classic tiramisù topped with shards of coffee-soaked pasta cooked until crisp.
Sea Front Pasta Bar, Piazza Municipio 1. For two pastas and a dessert, expect to pay around 60 to 70 euros.
Substance
To find something new Substance restaurant, across the street from the national archeological museum; enter the tall, glass-covered arcades of the 19th-century Galleria Principe di Napoli; past the potted palms and white-coated bartenders filling the Art Nouveau-style Scotto Jonno cocktail bar; and climb the carpeted stone steps until you reach the elegant dining rooms decorated with swirling Liberty-esque wallpaper and authentic Tiffany lamps.
Opened in May, this hidden-away restaurant serves complex dishes of southern Italian and Mediterranean ingredients paired with natural wines. The menu comes from chef Marco Ambrosino, a native of the nearby island of Procida who previously made a name for himself in 28 Posts in Milan.
On a recent evening, his concoctions featured some imaginative deployments of classic Campania ingredients, notably an artichoke heart filled with mountain truffle cream, and succulent mutton in a light sauce of jus and fermented butter. Dessert could be a herby sorbet of fig leaves in laurel oil.
For a nightcap, consider returning to the ground-floor lounge. The Strega del Vesuvio cocktail (15 euros), as red and as powerful as the volcano it is named after, mixes Scotch, gin, coffee liqueur and a cordial of tomatoes grown on the slopes of Vesuvio in a tangy, smoky digestivo .