Armando al Pantheon

A few steps from the Pantheon, on a street so narrow that it barely registers as you walk past, Armando al Pantheon has been feeding Rome since 1961. The Gargioli family still runs it across a handful of small rooms, and the kitchen has never shown much interest in reinvention. This is Roman cooking in its classic register: guanciale, pecorino, artichokes, sweetbreads, and a stubborn belief that a dish is finished when it tastes right rather than when it looks new.

The spaghetti alla griscia is the test. Made from nothing but pasta water, pecorino, black pepper and cured pork jowl, it is the ancestor of both carbonara and amatriciana, and it lives or dies on the quality of the guanciale and the nerve of whoever is at the stove. Order it, then order the saltimbocca alla romana, veal with prosciutto and sage kept wet with a little white wine and butter, and, if the season allows, carciofi alla giudia: an artichoke flattened and deep-fried until it opens like a flower. The salt cod, the rigatoni with pajata, the coda alla vaccinara — the menu is a list of dishes Romans argue about, cooked without irony.

The dining room is small and the regulars are loyal, so booking is not optional. Lunch is when the room belongs most to Rome itself. Dinner brings a mix of locals and, since the restaurants around the Pantheon became a stop on television itineraries, a steady trickle of curious visitors. Prices are modest for the address, which is part of the restaurant's charm: you are eating extremely well a few metres from one of the most photographed monuments in Europe.

Stanley Tucci filmed here for Searching for Italy, using the restaurant as his way into the subject of Rome's defining ingredient, guanciale, the cured pig cheek that gives the city's pasta its backbone. Sit down, order the griscia, and you are eating essentially the same meal in the same room that the series used to explain why Rome cooks the way it does.