Da Enzo Al 29 Rome: The Best Pasta In Rome
One of the most satisfying and enjoyable dining experiences you can have in Rome is at Da Enzo Al 29. It is one of the most typical and rigorous restaurants in the city, a place still endowed with a soul, where courtesy, taste, and a certain retro-pop charm are at home.
The location is strategic, right at the beginning of Trastevere. Coming from the historic center, just two steps, cross the Palatine bridge, another minute and you can sit at one of the best tables in Rome.
After a morning spent visiting the Colosseum, the Forums, the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano, and Colle Palatino (Palatine Hill), you can refresh yourself with the great classics of Capitoline cuisine: carciofi (artichokes) alla Giudia, carbonara, amatriciana, pasta with al Sugo di coda (tail sauce), coda alla vaccinara and to finish the legendary tiramisu in the glass.
There is nothing new under the sun. The stylistic research is clear and spartan: to offer tasteful and sensual dishes full of flavor and pepper. Everything is well cared for, abundant, lipidically satisfying. You will risk exploding if you take a trinity of fried food and a first course. If you add a dessert, you will have to run a marathon to burn 2000 calories.
Will you find carbonara in bacon foam with yolk nitrogenous air? Is it a revolutionary restaurant? Not and it doesn’t want to be. Da Enzo Al 29 wants to amaze you with the spartan goodness of his dishes, not with futuristic techniques or sauces. First choice ingredients, taste, and a relaxed atmosphere.
Appetizers
The artichokes alla Giudia were impeccable. Crunchy, not greasy, but greedy. They are among the best artichokes in Rome.
Fried zucchini flowers: good but subdued. Weighted down by a batter that sank the flavors and acted as armor, not a casket.
Like Neapolitan-style croquettes, the cheese bombs were delicious, but nothing more, a pleasant interlude before the real battle.
First dishes
The Carbonara
Let’s start with the pivot plate. Well done, creamy, with rigatoni cooked al dente drowned in a perfectly blended cream of egg yolk and pecorino, with excellent consistency. In the proper tension between flavor and creaminess. Spectacular.
La Gricia, like a different good twin, is greased at the right point, with that dreamlike charm that only the combination of pepper and bacon can create.
The cacio e pepe pasta was solemn, hyperbolic in the concentration of flavors, crowned by a pepper shower, but with a divine taste.
The Amatriciana has a comforting and warm sauce. It embraces you with a sea of tomato, fat, and pecorino cheese blended in a primordial embrace. Very tasty, the bite is irresistible.
Pepper and salt pushed on the palate, but It created a schism. It will disappoint those accustomed to a polished and dry sauce with tomato that dyes only the pasta.
This drowns in a thick sauce full of Pecorino Romano. The dish is very rustic but genuinely irresistible.
Pasta with sugo di coda (tail sauce) is the polar opposite: little dressing and much pulled meat. A dish of tribal Roman charm, with a sprinkling of cocoa on top that leaves no way out. More dapper as a dish, tasty and super light; in any case, very good and well-balanced.
Abbacchio (Roasted Lamb) is classic, delicate, and easy to approach.
Coda alla vaccinara sparked a hellish controversy: it has few pine nuts, there is no celery, and it is bland. Overall it is a simple dish, simple in its impassive simplicity, but it is not so incisive.
The meat is tasty but not remarkable: it doesn’t have that much flavor. The cooking, however, was excellent. The cocoa gives contrast, and the pine nuts are there even if they are few, but overall it does its duty.
Stir-fried chicories are essential. Always take them to degrease the mouth. They are excellent, and calling them a side dish is a disservice.
Desserts are a bomb of taste and calories, made with love. Once again, the watchword is simplicity, not of flavor, but concept.
The tiramisu is gorgeous, it hits hard, but it has an imaginative texture. Disrespectful of your coronaries, spoon after spoon flows without delay.
Let’s talk about the environment and the file “problem.” Da Enzo Al 29 is one of the most iconic restaurants in Rome and therefore you will always find kilometric queues, on the other hand, the place is small and cannot be booked.
In winter, you can eat outside with your jacket on, and if you’re lucky, you will feel great on a sunny day.
Bonus for the lady who lives upstairs and stops to have a lovely conversation telling you a thousand anecdotes about the neighborhood.
The only problem is the cars that occasionally venture into the alley and take it out on the amatriciana, but you can’t have everything in life.
Our last visit dates back to February 2, 2022, a few days ago then. Definitely a period of physiological slack, not to mention the desert created by Covid. Finding tourists was a rarity.
At the Colosseum, there were no more than 60 people who then went to eat there. In the good old days, the queue was of a very different size. So if you want to go there, be cautious and anticipate. If you arrive at 1 pm, it is a disaster.
Prices
Many will say it is expensive. A plate of carbonara costs 15 euros, too much perhaps? First of all, ban on the usual banalities that restaurants must be pop, there is poverty, crisis, and the shepherds ate the Gricia with sheep on the Gran Sasso and spent much less money. Don’t bother with the tripadvisor haters.
It is certainly not cheap, they push a lot on the image of typically, and we are a historic place, but (once in a while) it’s all true, not a marketing gimmick from the Templars of the bacon.
The caliber of experience is undeniable, the kindness unique, and the place a piece of living history, thanks to sunny people who keep the tradition alive with rigor.
So it was not expensive. You pay for the knowledge, the atmosphere, and feeling good and serene and not just the dish itself.
But as long as we continue to consider catering only as a mere mechanical operation of transforming ingredients into a dish quantifiable in euros, we will have provincial consumers.
If you buy Lidl bacon, okay, do what you want, but you pay for the quality here. The tradition itself pays for itself. Not to mention that the dishes are abundant and can be divided: it is not a place to have lunch every day, also for obvious reasons of cholesterol survival.
If you pay 7 euros for a bathtub of carbonara, perhaps you should ask yourself two questions about the origin of the ingredients. And about the working (and economic) conditions of the restaurant, and maybe it would be appropriate to read a small masterpiece of social enlightenment such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
Da Enzo al 29 is a top-five restaurant in Rome.