Roman cuisine: porchetta, carbonara, suppli, Quinto Quarto

Par Gabriel Goldberg 9 June 2026 6 min read

To close the Rome series, I wanted to stop at what stays — beyond the fountains, the domes and the obelisks. What stays is the taste. Four days of eating in Rome, no reservations, no guide, choosing counters and neighbourhood trattorias at random. Here is what I understood about Roman cooking. Start with an espresso, standing at the counter Espresso at the counter, near the Pantheon — the first sip sets the day. In Rome, coffee is not a long morning ritual. It is a comma. You walk into a bar , pay first at the till, hand the ticket to the barista, drink in thirty seconds, leave. The price of a counter espresso still hovers around one euro — one of the last stable economic indicators in Europe. My favourite cup here is at Tazza d'Oro, a few steps from the Pantheon I covered in the first notebook . Thick crema, clean bitterness, no sugar needed. What struck me after several coffees in Brussels these past months — see my notes on the Istanbul art of changing continents between two coffees — is that Rome doesn't play the specialty card. The city defends classic espresso, dark roast, fast service. Two opposing philosophies, two pleasures. Porchetta, Lazio's secular religion At Mercato di Testaccio: porchetta is carved on demand, in a warm panino. Porchetta is the centerpiece of Roman popular cooking. A whole deboned pig, stuffed with garlic, rosemary, pepper and wild fennel, slowly roasted. The skin becomes an amber shell that cracks under the knife; the meat, infused with…