A Rome restaurant celebrates classics
THE ochre walls at Santo Palato are hung with loud, futuriststyle posters embodying the stylised cubism of 1920s Italian art. This design scheme is more than a trendy aesthetic choice. It prefigures the menu’s bold and decisive flavours and signals that the dishes are clearly rooted in their location: the San Giovanni neighbourhood southeast of central Rome, which was laid out during the fascist era to house working-class families.
Today, San Giovanni is a graffiti-tagged middle-class area laden with trattorias serving comfort food that defines the Roman culinary canon: carbonara, cacio e pepe, simmered oxtails, stewed tripe. Many of these places offer filling but unremarkable fare, making the newcomer Santo Palato stand out in a way that goes beyond its bright, polychrome décor.
The restaurant, which opened in April, is the latest from its owner, Marco Pucciotti, who has entrusted the chef Sarah Cicolini to helm this selfdescribed trattoria moderna. In Rome, the use of “modern” is typically a red flag that accompanies menus featuring gummy sous vide proteins and unpleasant deconstructed classics. But Cicolini isn’t forcing the evolution of classics from her tiny kitchen. Rather, her menu is quite traditional and she expertly coaxes intense flavours from fine local ingredients using restrained techniques, a rarity among young chefs in Rome.
Cicolini, 29, has already spent nearly all her life in food service, first at home, then in hotels in her native Abruzzo, and finally in bars and restaurants since moving to Rome a decade ago. Eventually, she landed at the one-Michelinstarred Metamorfosi where, she said, “my chef, Roy Caceres, taught me what it was to love eating while applying technique”.
After Metamorfosi, she opened Sbanco, a popular trattoria-pizzeria, developing pasta, meat and fish dishes, and also developing her own style in the process. “What I am doing now,” she said, “is born from my passion to cook a certain way, a way that is simple but that uses creative methods to maximise flavour.”
Cicolini mitigates the effect of a small kitchen staff by focusing on a handful of dishes cooked to order: a delightfully unctuous chicken offal frittata, a slick and savoury carbonara and an intense and bright amatriciana, among them, supplemented with Roman dishes that benefit from advance preparations. The choice isn’t so much a compromise as it is a celebration of Rome’s many batch-prepared classics like pomodori al riso, hollowed-out tomatoes filled with rice and baked with potatoes until the tomato is perfectly withered and nearly caramelised.
On a recent trip, in addition to the previously dishes, there were many standouts and few missteps. One could perhaps find fault with the presentation of pesche al vino, peaches macerated in wine, which were stuffed awkwardly into a wineglass. But the most exciting item in the parade of comfort foods that exit in Cicolini’s kitchen was trippa alla romana, tender strips of tripe simmered in a sauce that had the bright acidity of fresh tomatoes, a rendition of a classic that is decidedly lighter and more digestible than the typical Roman-style trippa.
When asked about her signature dish, Cicolini is quick to divert credit.
“I didn’t invent anything here,” she said. “I learned how to cook tripe from my grandma.”