Where to Eat Now in Rome
We’ve eaten a lot of food to put together this ranking, based on repeat and anonymous visits. These are our absolute favorite food & wine experiences in Rome as of May 2018.
All posts by The Mouth
Our Map of Recommended Rome Restaurants
We’re publishing a fresh new restaurant review every single day all summer long. But for those of you who need to know where to go right now, here’s a map of our preferences.
Purple hearts for our absolute favorites.
Green icons for restaurants we strongly recommend.
Yellow icons for restaurants that are good, but not among the best in their style.
Red for restaurants we don’t recommend.
You can check back regularly for full restaurant reviews to understand the reasons behind our colors. But this should be enough in the meantime to help you find something delicious in Rome.
Ristoranti d’Italia by Gambero Rosso
In addition to the ratings that follow, Gambero Rosso in their “Ristoranti d’Italia” guide also made several awards for 2018:
- Best chefs: Roy Caceres from Metamorfosi, Anthony Genovese from Il Pagliaccio, Heinz Beck from La Pergola
- Best wine cellars: La Pergola, Achilli Enoteca al Parlamento, Antica Pesa, Casa Bleve, Il Convivio Troiani
I Cento by EDT
I Cento is a relative newcomer among printed guides to dining in Rome (and other cities). The Roman guide is penned by Federico De Cesare Viola and Luciana Squadrilli, who divide their favorite 100 addresses in and around Rome into 2 categories – 50 “Top” restaurants and 50 “Pop” trattorias or more simple eateries. We’ll admit that it’s not always clear to us why one place is classified as a restaurant and one a more simple trattoria. For example, why would Mazzo and Pianostrada be included in the more formal “Top” category and Da Cesare or Santo Palato among the simple “Pop” grouping? In any case, we really appreciate that their selection is tight and that they’ve ranked the restaurant selections. Read more
Guida ai Sapori di Roma by La Repubblica
The major newspaper La Repubblica publishes a massive annual guide to dining in Rome called the “Guida ai Sapori e ai Piaceri.” It has more than 700 pages, and probably half of these are advertising. Sections organized by location are useful if you really want to dig deep in a particular neighborhood, but otherwise we find this guide too big and unwieldy, with too few rankings, to be very useful.
They do, however, make a few annual awards and we’ve included these below: Read more
I Ristoranti d’Italia by L’Espresso
Le Guide de L’Espresso has been publishing their annual guide to dining in Italy – I Ristoranti d’Italia – since 1978. They also now publish their guide as a mobile app.
They rate restaurants with cappelli symbols – toques or chef’s hats – according to the following scale:
1 cappello good
2 cappelli high quality
3 cappelli great
4 cappelli excellent
5 cappelli the absolute best Read more
Roma nel Piatto by La Pecora Nera
La Pecora Nera has been publishing their annual guide to Rome restaurants called “Roma nel Piatto” since 2003 [in Italian]. They write that their strength is “not having conflicts of interest with critically evaluated subjects in our guides, so that we can write in the reader’s unique interest. This means visits in real anonymity paying the bill as any customer.”
Restaurants in their guide are evaluated from 1-10 according to the following scale: 0 to 4.5 totally insufficient 5 to 5.5 insufficient 6 to 6.5 sufficient 7 to 7.5 good, very good 8 to 8.5 great, remarkable8.5 + excellent
In 2018, they rated the following restaurants as “The Best” in Rome Read more
