I spend a lot of time thinking about pubs. When lockdown forced pubs to close in March 2020, I was fearful that many would not survive the financial strain, and my worries were well-founded. It was not easy to run a pub before the global pandemic; Britain lost 22% of its pubs between 2001 and 2019. In March, April and May of 2020 I painted watercolour postcards of my favourite pubs; I stared longingly through their uncleaned windows, and gave a few quid to fundraisers for struggling pubs when they came to my attention. Not all of them reopened.
It was not drinking that I missed; I could just as well do that at home. It was everything else. When George Orwell wrote at length about his dream pub, The Moon Under Water, he was right to notice that:
“If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere.’”
I have just spent the best part of two weeks isolating in my small bedroom in Rome. I had Covid, and though I was lucky to be over the worst of it after a week or so, I still could not leave without a negative test. It surprised me to discover that I seldom daydreamed about pubs, though I still thought about them, as I often do, when trying to get to sleep.
I did not dream of bars either, which you might think would be Italy’s closest equivalent to pubs. A bar is not a bar in the American sense of the word, but rather, its function is closer to that of a café. It is rare to find somebody ‘propping up’ an Italian bar, that is, lingering there for hours on end, although there are important and cherished exceptions to this general rule, like the great Bar San Calisto in Rome’s Trastevere.
I was not daydreaming about pubs because I was too busy daydreaming about trattorie: simple, casual restaurants, where one emphatically does linger (and linger, and linger). Will Stewart has an excellent podcast about cookbooks, called A Cook’s Library. It is there where I first heard Rachel Roddy suggest that the trattoria is the real Italian equivalent of the pub, and in that moment something profound clicked for me: I realised that I loved them both for similar reasons. The best trattorie, like the best pubs, feel democratic and convivial; functional, but just that little bit special.
I think that somewhere in their head, everybody has their own Moon Under Water. Orwell’s perfect pub is his very personal ideal, one unique to him. I doubt anybody else quite shares all of his preferences. We all value slightly different things in a pub, and in a restaurant, and that is only right. It can be fun, though, to think about why we like the places we like: to try and identify the ways they resemble the perfect and unattainable pub or trattoria of the mind, and the ways they fall slightly short.
It is in that spirit — and with apologies to Orwell — that I have spent far too long in the past two weeks thinking about what makes the perfect Roman trattoria, while I could not leave the house to eat.
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My favourite trattoria is named after its founder, who ideally had an Italianised version of an Ancient Roman name. Let’s call it Da Claudio. It is on a street with very little passing traffic, parallel to the tram line, so that from the tables outside you can occasionally hear the distant hum of metal against metal.
Around half of Da Claudio’s customers are committed regulars that live or work in the immediate vicinity. One quarter have travelled there from elsewhere in the city, because they know it’s worth the journey. One quarter are out-of-towners who have done a bit of research. In short, all sorts of people enjoy eating here, including families with children.
Children are fussed over to a considerable degree by the waiters at Da Claudio, and get special treatment as regards dessert. I am in full agreement with Orwell that excluding children is a “puritanical nonsense” in a restaurant, as it is in a pub, except perhaps for the ones whose very purpose is to be ‘rowdy’ (there is a time and place for every kind of pub).
Da Claudio is on the ground floor of a residential block that was built towards the very end of the nineteenth century, but without too many of the baroque flourishes that characterised the Liberty style of the period. It has translucent curtains, and the name of the restaurant and the year it was founded (1962) are printed on each of its large west-facing windows. Its metal shutters are closed on Sundays, and for a fortnight in January after the rush of the Christmas period, and for the best part of August.
The walls have plenty of coat hooks, and diners know to use them. The bottom third of the walls are dark wood-panelled, and the top two-thirds are a clean white. Every other year, the owners varnish the wood and repaint the rest of the walls, because although Da Claudio is casual, is emphatically not shabby.
On the walls there are pictures of staff parties in years gone by. There are framed black-and-white photographs of historic places of local interest, like the fountain in the piazza, and the old market, before it was demolished to make way for the new market. The main decorations, though, are the shelves of wine bottles, which are never allowed to gather dust.
Da Claudio is always busy but never crowded. It is not a bad idea to call ahead, but the staff know when the most dedicated regulars will be coming anyway, and will make sure their favourite tables are free. The entrance takes you to straight into the main dining room, which contains the bar and the till, with the kitchen not far behind. The adjacent dining room is a little quieter. The lighting is low and warm; there is not a white bulb in the house.
There are tables out on the street, and there are parasols for when you need them, but there are no electric heaters, and there are none of the tarpaulin ‘walls’ that turn outside dining areas into some sort of gazebo. It’s fine to smoke out front, and the waiters will quickly bring around an ashtray for those who do. But because the tables are well spaced out — the restaurant is long, and so is the outside area — the smell doesn’t bother the rest of the customers.
Behind the bar are two metal casks for the house wine, which is decent enough, quite pleasant in fact, but nothing special. Its job is not to be special, but to be reliable. The important thing is that the house wine is really very cheap, because the grapes come from a bit of land that has always been in the family, down towards the Castelli Romani. The house wine is served in quarter-litre, half-litre and whole-litre jugs, which are then poured into Duralex glasses.
The owner’s daughter knows her grapes, however, and makes sure that the wine list, all six pages of it (nothing is superfluous) contains a decent collection of conventional and natural wines, especially ones from the surrounding region. The wines by the glass are on rotation, but there are always at least six on the go. There are a few ‘special occasion’ bottles, including a good Franciacorta.
The meat, the fish and the vegetables come from stalls in the neighbourhood market, where Da Claudio’s owners have a reputation for being ‘firm but fair.’ Behind their backs, the greengrocer complains that they’re a pain in the arse, and maybe they are, but they buy plenty, and they always pay on time.
Da Claudio is nothing if not a decent employer. Some family businesses are known to be a bit casual with these things, but not Da Claudio, whose owners pride themselves on retaining staff, and on keeping them happy. It’s known in the neighbourhood as a good place to work.
There is no music in the dining area, but at the very beginning of service you might just be able to make out the radio playing in the kitchen. The second time you eat there, the staff ask: “haven’t we seen you here before?” By the third, you feel like part of the furniture, and when you leave, the waiter shouts ciao caro, alla prossima — “bye, dear, until next time” — because he and you both know that this is a regular thing now, and not just an occasional fling.
The house wine is quite weak, like all the best house wines, so most people order it with lunch. You don’t have to ask for bread, and the waiters replace it when they see it’s about to finish. The bread is a very absorbent sourdough with a dark crust from the new-ish bakery on the main square: the owners do not believe in tradition for tradition’s sake. Filtered fizzy and still water are on tap behind the bar, and all the tables are regularly topped up.
Da Claudio has a pranzo di lavoro, a quick “working lunch” menu with a little antipasto of cheeses and meats; three or four of the classic Roman pasta dishes (including a mean carbonara) and a few secondi: the slow-cooked oxtail is always just right. I say that it is a “quick” working lunch, but nobody seems to stay for much less than an hour; most stay for closer to two.
Specials are on a blackboard, and they always follow the grammar of the weeks and the seasons: Thursday gnocchi, Friday fish, Saturday tripe. Puntarelle in winter; artichokes (both soft, alla romana, and deep-fried, alla giudia) in spring. There is not a QR code in sight, nor is there Wi-Fi. There is, however, a decent selection of dishes that just so happen to be vegetarian, and they are thought through with all the care and attention that is dedicated to the rest of the menu. The kitchen stocks a high-quality gluten-free pasta, and wouldn’t dream of charging extra for the privilege. Nobody who works in the kitchen really watches MasterChef.
The dinner menu is the same as the lunch menu but without the pranzo di lavoro, which is a slightly cheaper and pared down version of the full menu. Even the full menu still fits elegantly on an A4 piece of card (never laminated) with room to spare. You can order a half-portion of pasta for half the price of a full portion.
Every table is rectangular, and a beige-yellow sheet of blotting paper serves the function of a tablecloth. Unless you have ordered something that requires special cutlery, like soup, or a fiddly bit of meat, you keep the same knife and fork until it is time for dessert. No matter what other desserts are on offer — a torta di ricotta e visciole, or something deep and chocolatey — there is always tiramisù, and it never runs out. The tiramisù is scooped carefully from a deep tray, which lives, like all the desserts, in a glass-doored fridge behind the bar.
The waiters will not ask about coffee until everybody has finished dessert. After coffee, somebody, usually the owner, will bring around a digestivo. The owner, an older gentleman, is fond of referring to this as an ammazzacaffè: a little shot to ‘kill’ or neutralise the effect of the coffee that came before it. This ammazzacaffè is on the house, unless you order something special, like a fancy grappa.
It goes without saying that nobody is ever hurried to leave, no matter how busy Da Claudio gets.
To paraphrase Orwell: there may well be a trattoria of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know of any trattoria with just that combination of qualities. But to somebody grateful to have recovered from a mercifully brief illness, and back exploring the trattorie of Rome, that does not really matter. I know that there are plenty of places that are close enough, and that in itself is a precious thing.