Via di Monte Testaccio 30, Rome (+39 0657 46318). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80
Expediency can feed us well. Those restaurants that define what they do by what’s close at hand really can be some of the most satisfying: that place close by the docks, where the fish is landed by the door; the café by the mountain dairy where not serving cheese fondue would be idiotic. There really are few better places for oysters in Britain than the Company Shed on West Mersea in Essex. This has everything to do with the fact that the ramshackle outfit backs on to an oyster farm.
Checchino dal 1887 is a Roman restaurant where the menu is defined entirely by location. It first launched in the year marked above the door as a wine shop and bar. It took advantage of the cool temperatures in the caves dug into Monte Testaccio, a massive hill built entirely of fragments of Roman olive oil jugs. The bar was designed to cater for the coming trade from the slaughter houses being built across the road which opened in 1890. But those slaughter houses brought something else: the leftover offal that was given to the slaughtermen as part of their meagre income. This they would bring over to the bar to be cooked up.
Nearly 130 years later the slaughterhouses have gone but the restaurant remains, still owned by the same family, the Marianis, still with a terrific wine list and still with an offal-dominated menu. It is the answer to the question “Where should I eat in Rome?”.
Because it’s not an easy city in which to eat well. This, I know, is a kind of middle-class foodie heresy. How dare you suggest Rome is anything other than a glutton’s paradise, drenched in the heavily reduced liquor of authenticity? And of course there are great eating opportunities, not least the globe artichokes deep-fried in the Jewish style to a golden crunchiness, a gift from my people to yours. And yes, there are great pasta dishes. The problem, as ever, is the downside to a robust culinary tradition. The Romans have a serious, codified set of dishes to which they cleave like cats to their kittens. But that’s almost all they have. As long as you get the good stuff it’s brilliant. On day one. And perhaps on day two. Maybe even on day three.
By day four you’ll be scanning menus in the way convicts scan their cells looking for a way out. It will be time for the journey over the Tiber to that unglamorous part of town, and the wood-panelled arch of Checchino, named after a long-gone family member. There, the two bearded Mariani brothers – one in the kitchen, one front of house – do as generations of Marianis always have. The hilarious thing is how a particular type of ingredient can shape the character of a meal.
Yes, they have a list of pasta dishes which root you to the Italian capital. There is bucatini – a hollow spaghetti – with slices of salty, cured pig cheek, the fat just on the edge of melting, under a snowfall of aged ewe’s milk cheese. From the sunnier side of the menu there is spaghetti with a tomato sauce in which tuna has fragmented, with a ballast of capers and black olives.
But it’s elsewhere that the fun really begins. From the antipasti there is a dish of calf’s head, long boiled in a spiced broth, then pressed and chilled, before being sliced thinly and served on a warm plate so the gelatine and fat begins to melt. Or there is a small beer and bacon “pie” – in truth more of a light, savoury muffin. All of a sudden we could be eating the food of Lancashire. The calf’s head is a kissing cousin of brawn; the pie recalls the best savoury puddings. Visit Rome; taste Burnley.
The translations on the English language version of the menu are anatomical and to the point. There is “small intestine of lamb grilled with salt and black pepper”, or cooked in a light tomato sauce. There’s stewed tripe with more ewe’s milk cheese, pork skin in tomato sauce or padellotto alla macellara, which apparently is a “dish of the old slaughter house, sautéed veal inners and white wine”. There are trotters and tongues. It is like stumbling across the original sacred text upon which Fergus Henderson based his menu at St John. Certainly, if the realisation that animals have inner organs makes you a bit wobbly and tearful, do not come here.
I have the mixed roasted lamb entrails: the sweetbreads, liver, small intestine and testicles, all of which come lightly breaded and crisp and rich and unctuous. I eat these things not to prove I AM MAN but because, by God, that’s where the flavour is. Another dish of lamb’s liver and onions slaps us right back to the Ribble Valley. A few roast potatoes and a stew of some softly bitter chicory helps it all on its way.
There is a glorious disconnect between the smells and heat of Rome in the summer – it was around 36C every day when I was there, and it really can honk – and these plates of food, full of darkness and intent. These are the dishes forged from poverty; the flavours, however, are distinctly rich. Desserts are mostly creamy frozen things which, eaten at an outside table as a close Roman night falls, is a fine end to the meal.
With this we drink a crisp, dry Italian gewürztraminer at €24 from a list which gives the impression that buying anything over €35 is gauche. Let’s not bang on about the price differential. The economy of Rome is not the same as the economy of London, and it will still cost you a plane ticket to get there, but it’s pleasing to eat so well in the Italian capital for so much less than you might be charged for the equivalent back in the British capital.
After dinner we are shown the cellar, a high-ceilinged room dug into Monte Testaccio, and reached through a gnarled wooden door out the back of the kitchen. It is cool back here and via backlit nooks you can see where 2,000 years ago the curving fragments of olive oil pots were stacked up to create the mass. What’s striking is that this room is still used for the purpose it first took back in 1887.
Checchino isn’t a piece of history. It’s a living, breathing restaurant which just happens to have been doing its thing for a very long time indeed.
Jay’s news bites
■ Le Langhe in York, where the import business for the shop up front feeds the restaurant up back, has long been blighted by complaints about service. Recently I hear things have improved markedly. So now you can safely order silken pastas with sauces of gorgonzola and walnuts, or hazelnut tortes that thrum with the flavours of Mitteleuropa (lelanghe.co.uk).
■ From the “How did we live without this?” department: autumn sees the opening in Covent Garden of a restaurant – I use the term loosely – dedicated entirely to chips. There will be truffle chips, curry chips with mango chutney and even beer-battered chips, which ought to be illegal but isn’t. It will be called Come Fry With Me and the food will arrive on a mini airport baggage carousel. I so wish I was making this up.
■ And from the same department, Devon’s Portlebay Popcorn has announced what they believe is the first cappuccino- flavoured popcorn. However the very next day Ten Acres announced the launch of their cappuccino-flavoured popcorn. Because we need choice (portlebay popcorn.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
