Italy’s humble street food, which includes such ingredients as cow stomach and pig intestine, is getting an upscale makeover as chefs at some of Italy’s finest restaurants take the beloved flavors and techniques of curbside cuisine indoors.
Open Colonna, a new restaurant in Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni, offers fine delicacies including foie gras and braised lamb in wine must, but it also serves a traditional panino con porchetta, or roasted suckling pig seasoned with a blend of garlic and herbs and dry-roasted for hours in a wood oven.
The sandwich, a Roman specialty from Ariccia on the Alban Hills, is traditionally served in a far more modest setting: from vans parked on the side of the road.
Chef-owner Antonello Colonna says he decided to incorporate porchetta into the menu because it’s an old Roman specialty that plays equally well in a relaxed, indoor setting.
“It’s about the resurgence of this food, a rebirth of our local culinary culture and roots, bringing good, rich food inside,” says Colonna, whose elegant restaurant, with a glass atrium and sleek furniture, has a wax sculpture of a pig, along with two red, 100-year-old meat slicers on display. “I want my customers to understand what local cuisine is when they come here. I want them to taste it.”
Street food, long a part of Italy’s curbside scene, was originally poor-man’s fare, offering protein at an affordable cost. Most of it was concocted from the parts of the animal at which fancy restaurants turned up their noses, such as stir-fried stomach and spleen.
Vendors in makeshift stalls in Florence, for example, have been serving panino con lampredotto, cow stomach seasoned with a red-chile sauce on a roll dipped in broth, for several hundred years. In Naples, trippa, the cow’s first three stomachs, is the city’s street cuisine of choice. Meanwhile, in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, longtime specialties are meusa, thinly sliced pork spleen with salt on soft bread; panelli, fried chickpea-flour patties with lemon juice; and arancini, rice balls filled with meat.
The inexpensive price tag—the average sandwich costs €4, or about $6—and hearty taste have helped further street food’s reputation as an Italian staple. But despite its modest service environment and history as cuisine for the poor, the food has wide appeal.
“If we are going to call this fast food then this is fast food, but Italian fast food at its greatest,” says Faith Heller Willinger, an Italian-food expert and author of “Adventures of an Italian Food Lover,” who runs a food travel service in Florence.
Heller says Italian chefs are rediscovering the pleasures of the cucina povera, or poor cooking, that is rich in dishes of robust flavors, and rerouting the path indoors.
Colonna, who averages 150 covers at lunch and 50 at dinner, says most of his customers are business executives who crave street food but rarely find themselves at festivals or in the vicinity of parked vans.
“My customers go crazy for porchetta, it’s the most popular item at lunch practically every day,” says Colonna, whose panino con porchetta costs €5, or about $7.25.
Cinzia Scaffidi, director of the Slow Food Study Center in Bra in the Piedmont region, says it’s natural that traditional street food is making its way inside fine restaurants.
Concerns over cleanliness and freshness often discouraged people from eating street food, even though the local government regulates vendors.
“The fact is that it’s not easy for all people, especially foreigners, to eat street food,” says Scaffidi, who noted that the language barrier for foreigners also complicates things. “They are uneasy, apprehensive and worried about the ingredients. If people are going to eat stomach, spleen or something else, then they may have some questions, but there is no time for that on the street, especially since there are people waiting behind you.
“But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to eat street food, they just want to eat it someplace else.”
To meet that demand, several Michelin-star restaurants in Italy are updating menus to include street foods. Valeria Picini, chef-owner of Da Caino in Montemerano, a medieval village in Tuscany, says the locals understand street food, but there are large groups of customers who are curious. These people may also be somewhat nervous about eating innards on the street.
“The customers feel comfortable eating this type of food with us because they know it was made here in our kitchen that has certain standards,” she says.
Da Caino, founded in 1971, started inserting street food in its menu about three years ago. The basic ingredients are the same, but the presentation is a bit upscale.
Da Caino’s trippa e lampredotto dish, which costs €35, or about $50, includes a bite-size lampredotto sandwich, tripe Florentine-style, and a tripe and green-bean salad.
“The lampredotto is treated in a different way,” Picini says. “It’s more refined; it’s presented gracefully. We don’t just fill the bread with meat. We select the pieces one-by-one.”
Other restaurants also are offering the traditional flavors of the street. Ristorante Duomo in Ragusa, a small city in Sicily, is known as a restaurant that mixes ingredients and tastes from both poor and bourgeois cuisines. It offers arancini and panelli during certain holidays and festivities.
“It’s not something I offer every day, but I am aware that my customers also like these types of foods,” says Ciccio Sultano, Ristorante Duomo’s chef-owner, “and so I give them a taste every once in a while or if they specifically ask for it.”
The restaurant has 8,000 yearly covers and an average per-person check of €110, or about $160.
Sultano, whose restaurant is located inside an 18th-century building with a Baroque hall furnished with romantic furniture, says the high-end atmosphere and high-quality cuisine of his restaurant take street food to a new level, but the spirit of the food remains the same.
“The standards we cook with are not the same, and so the taste is very different even though we may be cooking the same food,” says Sultano, who made an example out of the oil used to fry arancini. “But what we do have in common is that we know this food is good and real, and we make it available.”