The worldwide culinary fame of Italy’s third-largest metropolis boils down to 1 phrase: pizza. You’ll be able to hardly hurl a tomato within the meals’s purported birthplace — a scruffy, graffiti-stained port metropolis of monumental Baroque buildings and slim cobbled passageways — with out hitting a gaggle of culinary pilgrims jockeying to enter one of many a whole bunch (or hundreds, by some counts) of pizzerias.
However a slew of top-notch trattorias, osterias and ristoranti exist proper alongside pizza titans like Sorbillo and Da Michele. Drawing on the cornucopia of livestock and produce from the fertile fields and coastal waters of the Campania area — cattle, goats, shellfish, wheat, artichokes, zucchini, figs, citrus fruits and extra — these eateries dish out native innovations from mussel soup to homegrown pastas to limoncello.
So once you’re able to foray past the overcrowded dens of dough and pink sauce, listed here are 5 addresses in 5 neighborhoods providing each conventional and inventive takes on beloved Neapolitan recipes and elements. Buon appetito.
Historical past suffuses this homey, family-run restaurant tucked into the tight grid of streets that kinds the working-class Quartieri Spagnoli district, a hillside zone the place laundry appears to hold from each rusted wrought-iron balcony.
As opera arias and mawkish Italian ballads echo off the swirly, hand-painted, 18th-century wall tiles, a succession of time-honored Neapolitan dishes passes from the open kitchen to the worn picket tables, the place a primarily Italian clientele gobbles them down: fried eggplant, fried zucchini, fried rice balls, myriad meatballs and ziti underneath beneficiant ladles of thick, tomato-beef Neapolitan ragù (additionally on sale in jars for 8.50 euros, or about $9.25).
The seafood choices are equally worthy, together with tender anchovies and cod drenched in a dense sauce of tomatoes, capers and olives. For a coda, you’ll be able to stability salty with candy because of a sticky baba au rhum — a favourite Franco-Polish dessert adopted in Napoli within the 18th century.
Osteria della Mattonella, Through Giovanni Nicotera 13. A 3-course meal prices round 25 euros per particular person.
Tripperia O’Russ
Centuries in the past, girls from Napoli’s decrease courses would collect exterior royal residences in hopes of being granted the discarded entrails of the animals slaughtered for aristocrats’ banquets.
Lately you want solely go to one of many metropolis’s tripe eating places to style this enduring favourite, historically known as cucina povera — the meals of the poor — which is made variously from pigs’ ft, veal snout and bovine stomachs.
Begun as a pushcart enterprise in 1945, Tripperia O’Russ has for many years occupied a easy, brightly lit white eating room on a middle-class residential road close to the town’s botanical gardens, incomes a repute as Naples’s high temple of tripe. Amid the sound of hacking, a mixture of native of us from all walks of life collect to dine on easy soups, pastas and stews loaded with slow-cooked innards.
The Tris Trippa sampler, very best for the uninitiated, is a trio of tripe preparations: with potatoes and a skinny sauce of olive oil, onions, peppers and tomato; with heavy tomato sauce; and with a mixture of tomato sauce and beans. These with extra daring palates can get pleasure from carpaccio-ish slices of cooked veal tripe with only a lemon wedge as accompaniment. The restaurant serves no desserts, however huge bottles of Peroni beer (2.50 euros) complement the onslaught.
Regardless of its rustic décor and site in Naples’s historic heart, this cozy and in style spot is not any relic. Loaded with craft beers (together with a light, easy-drinking home I.P.A.) and a secondary menu of gluten-free choices, the four-year-old restaurant is run by a younger, tattooed employees and serves a clientele of in-the-know worldwide foodies.
Nonetheless, the reverent, old-school menu would have your Neapolitan grandmother smiling with recognition at objects like eggplant parmigiana and pasta with potatoes and provolone cheese.
Among the many antipasti, the mozzarella in carrozza demonstrates that the basic Campania cheese could be melted into tasty variations that require no pizza oven. Heated to stretchiness and unfold on thick slices of egg-dipped grilled bread, the mozzarella turns into the star of a bubbly, gooey sandwich. The cheese makes one other cameo within the crispy fried paccheri — a beloved Neapolitan noodle filled with a mix of tomato sauce, beef, pork, pork lard, raisins, pine nuts and mozzarella.
If you happen to can (and it will likely be a problem), save room for the meaty, tomato sauce-drenched chunks of rabbit cacciatore — a favourite dish from the close by island of Ischia.
La Locanda Gesù Vecchio, Through Giovanni Paladino 26. A 3-course meal prices round 30 euros per particular person.
Seafront Pasta Bar
Loads of onions and plenty of time. These are the secrets and techniques to Genovese sauce, a Naples specialty regardless of its Genoa-derived title. Concocted primarily from finely sliced onions — slow-cooked over a low flame for a number of hours — together with olive oil and tender slivers of beef, the sauce is so emblematic of Naples that it most likely deserves a towering monument within the grand sq. that the restaurant overlooks, Piazza Municipio.
The chunky, chewy ziti with Genovese sauce is simply one of many flavorful noodle creations at Seafront Pasta Bar, a minimalist Scandinavian-chic eating room above the boutique for the Di Martino pasta producer, which additionally operates the restaurant. Just like the ziti, the dry noodles bought within the store and served upstairs are made on the firm’s manufacturing facility within the close by city of Gragnano, a pasta mecca in Italy because of its lengthy historical past of pasta-making and the numerous high manufacturers nonetheless based mostly there.
Wealthy native flavors additionally come collectively within the spaghetti alle vongole — a swirl of buttery noodles larded with tender, candy clams and charred garlic that arrive underneath a glass dome of olive-oil smoke — and bucatini with an Ischia-inspired tomato sauce containing tender shredded rabbit.
Noodles even contribute to sure desserts, notably “pastamisù,” a basic tiramisù topped with coffee-soaked pasta shards which were baked to crispiness.
Sea Entrance Pasta Bar, Piazza Municipio 1. For 2 pastas and dessert, anticipate to pay round 60 to 70 euros.
Sustanza
To search out the brand new Sustanza restaurant, cross the road from the nationwide archaeological museum; enter the hovering, glass-covered arcades of the Nineteenth-century Galleria Principe di Napoli; slip previous the potted palms and white-coated bartenders that fill the Artwork Nouveau-style Scotto Jonno cocktail bar; and climb the carpeted stone steps till you attain elegant eating rooms adorned with swirling Liberty-esque wallpaper and actual Tiffany lamps.
Opened in Might, this hidden-away restaurant serves intricate dishes of southern Italian and Mediterranean elements accompanied by pure wines. The menu comes courtesy of the chef Marco Ambrosino, a local of the close by island of Procida who beforehand made a reputation for himself at 28 Posti in Milan.
On a current night, his concoctions featured a number of imaginative deployments of basic Campania elements, notably an artichoke coronary heart crammed with mountain truffle cream, and succulent mutton in a light-weight sauce of jus and fermented butter. Dessert is perhaps an herbaceous fig-leaf sorbet in laurel oil.
For a nightcap, contemplate returning to the ground-floor lounge. The Strega del Vesuvio cocktail (15 euros), as pink and potent because the volcano it’s named for, blends Scotch, gin, espresso liqueur and a cordial of tomatoes grown on Vesuvio’s slopes right into a tangy, smoky digestivo.
