Roma Sparita

Boy, is my face red. I’ve been living around the corner – literally a 20 metre walk – from Roma Sparita for the past 3 years, and I never once popped in to give it a go.

To be fair, it’s not like I should have expected much. From the outside, it’s just another unassuming restaurant in the corner of a piazza with a menu advertising the same cucina Romana you find in on every street and every piazza in Rome. There’s nothing that stands out about its menu. Plus, there are two major flags that I tend to watch out for when judging a restaurant. First, it’s beside a fairly solid tourist attraction – Santa Cecelia – which is usually a sure sign of a shithole that doesn’t care about quality (Trying to find a good place to eat around St. Peter’s is like walking through a culinary minefield). Secondly, it’s within spitting distance from Piazza dei Mercanti. Have you ever seen the restaurants there? One of them is decked out with a bunch of fake crap on the walls which is supposed to make it look like a ye olde trattoria but actually makes it seem like you’re eating right in the Pirates of the Caribbean. The other puts on a pantomime show during the summer, with people opening the windows of the building and shouting out of them. The whole thing is like a weird, distracting 18th century Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in. Both restaurants are extremely gimmicky and going heavily after the tourist market. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and they both seem like they do great business there. But it also means that I’ve been painting Roma Sparita with the same brush.

Here’s the embarrassing part: it took an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations to get me to check out Roma Sparita. Or, more specifically, their cacio e pepe. Now, cacio e pepe is my favourite pasta dish. It’s the one I always pounce on when I see it on a menu. Up until now, Da Augusto has been my favourite, by a long way. So my wife and I are watching No Reservations and we see Piazza Santa Cecilia and both shout ‘Hey! That’s Piazza Santa Cecilia!" But when they brought out the cacio e pepe, I leaned a little closer. Okay, so the whole thing is a little gimmicky, coming in a edible bowl made of parmesan. Then Bourdain started eating and his hyperbole glands kicked in. “I’m sure this is illegal somewhere,” “This could be the greatest thing in the history of the world” (ACTUAL QUOTE), “In order to enjoy this plate of food, what would I be willing to sacrifice from my past? … Catcher in the Rye… My third, fifth, seventh and ninth acid trips… my first sexual experience, definitely.” You get the picture.

So we took a stroll around last night. We got there at about 8.30pm without having booked ahead, and we were the first guests to be put into the “overflow” part of the restaurant. I started worrying that we were getting shoved into the “chump” (read: tourist) part, but the whole thing filled up within a few minutes. It was extremely popular. For starter, I got the bresaola with rocket and parmesan, my wife got the carciofi alla romana. Both were excellent, solid dishes, and very well done. When it came time to order our pasta, the waiter didn’t even wait for us to say anything, he just said “Cacio e pepe?” with a little wink. I think my defences must have been up because I wasn’t sure how to interpret the wink. Was he onto us? Was he saying “You look like Americans who saw this place on Anthony Bourdain and of course you’ve just come for the cacio e pepe.” Or was he saying “We know we knock this shit out of the park, so why would you ever want to order anything else?”

Turns out, it was the latter. It was a room full of Romans and everyone, I mean everyone, ordered the cacio e pepe. And for good reason.

That was easily the best cacio e pepe I have ever tasted. It follows a slightly different recipe - rather than being the traditional pasta covered in grated cheese and an assload of pepper with a drizzle of oil and leaving it to the eater to mix up, Roma Sparita cook the cheese and pepper sauce with butter which, in a Roman kitchen, is almost unheard of, before tossing in all the pasta and coating it all in the pan. It’s a great way of doing it, and one I think I’ll be copying when I make the dish myself. And then there’s the parmesan bowl, the “gimmick”. Personally, I left the entire bowl until the end and ate that as one giant crispy, cheesy flavour-bomb¹.

It was a delicious blast of umami and an amazing way to finish the meal. Leaving the place, my wife asked how we were going to manage the next few months. We have so many restaurants left to try in Rome before we leave, and all we want to do now is go back to Roma Sparita and gorge ourselves on the cacio e pepe. I told her I don’t think there would be any shame in that.

The Yester-Daily

Last week, News Corp unveiled their latest attempt to figure out this whole ’new media’ thing with the launch of The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper-magazine hybrid that is published, uh… dailyLike Abed from Community, News Corp aren’t great at coming up with names. It wasn’t the smoothest launch ever and it has already drawn a couple of complaints from the tech community. The first is that the app itself is slow and badly programmed. Gruber timed how long it took from launching the app to actually reading a single thing - one minute and twenty seconds.

This is just a teething problem, and I’m sure it’ll be fixed in later versions of the app. I mean, Loren Brichter managed to fix problems with The Daily’s carousel (the thing you use to navigate the different articles) in around two hours. I don’t think this is a show-stopper.

The other issue is more complicated. People like Ben Brooks complain that the biggest problem with The Daily is that its content is stale. Rather than pushing out up-to-the-minute news, The Daily pushes out yesterday’s news. Is it still news if it happened yesterday?

With respect, I think that Ben is missing the point, and I’ll explain why.

First, as with everything I write, I have to take you on a little diversion that seems completely irrelevant, but eventually ties back into the first subject.

There’s a videogame magazine called Edge (or, if as it’s called in the US, Next Gen). It’s the one magazine I’m completely devoted to, and I’ve got every issue going back to issue 3. It’s published monthly, which means that 95% of the news and reviews in the magazine have been scooped by online sites like Joystiq or Eurogamer. I’ve gotten into more debates than I care to remember with nerds who said that there was no longer any place for magazines, arguing first, why would people want to read stale content that’s potentially a month old, and second, why would people pay for stale content when they could get the fresh content, online, for free?

Okay, so let’s take a slightly more highbrow example: The International Herald Tribune. This is essentially nothing more than a reprint of yesterday’s New York Times. Who would want to read that? Well, Speaking anecdotally, this is the one reliable English-language newspaper you can get in Italy. It’s the one newspaper we get delivered to our newsroom (although it’s used more as toilet-reading than a source of news). Less anecdotally, the IHT has a circulation of around 219,188 - not bad for a reprint of “stale” content.

See, I think the issue isn’t about how “fresh” the news is, it’s about the quality of the writing. It’s depressing to see how much Churnalism there is in the world. For example, BBC News – which is where I tend to go to for my ‘breaking news’ – is mostly reprints of AP stories. It’s an understandable practice: when you’ve got a 24/7 news cycle, you just have to get stuff out there as quickly as possible, without being able to put much effort into it. And so I’ll go to BBC News for breaking news, but I tend to go elsewhere for analysis.

It’s the same with Edge. I’ll happily take a wobble over to Eurogamer and have a quick breeze through their reviews, to see what score they awarded a particular game, but I won’t read the actual review because their writing isn’t great. I’d rather wait for the Edge review, even if I have to wait the full month for it. With the IHT, yes, I’m happy to read yesterday’s New York Times because it’s (for the most part) still vaguely relevant and still better-written than most other newspapers.

With The Daily, technical kinks aside, I think that if the content is compelling enough, its “freshness” doesn’t matter.

(If you don’t have an iPad and want to see what all the fuss is about, Andy Baio knocked together The Daily: Indexed, where you can find browser-readable versions of all the stories from the iPad edition.)