Trattoria Da Enzo al 29

In the middle of Trastevere, on a narrow street where the cobbles run right up to the door, a trattoria with barely a dozen tables has been cooking Roman food since the 1930s. Da Enzo al 29 is the kind of place a neighbourhood keeps to itself: no reservations, a queue that forms before the shutters rise, and a menu that changes only when the market does. Stanley Tucci ate here while filming Searching for Italy, and the food explains why he kept steering the series back to this corner of Rome.

The pasta is the reason. Cacio e pepe is the purest test of technique in the city — nothing but tonnarelli, pecorino romano and a great deal of black pepper, bound with starchy pasta water and nerve. Get it wrong and it clumps; get it right and it is glossy, peppery and almost weightless. The carbonara and the amatriciana are made the same honest way, with guanciale cut thick enough to keep its bite. Then the artichokes: carciofi alla giudia, the Jewish-Roman style, flattened whole and fried until the leaves open like a flower and shatter at the edges. In winter the puntarelle arrive dressed with anchovy and vinegar, and the fritti — supplì, fried squash blossoms, a salt cod that changes with the day — round out a menu that reads like the Roman calendar.

There are no reservations, so the routine is simple: come early, put your name on the list, and wait on the street with a glass of wine. Lunch is calmer than dinner. Cash is still king. Prices stay low for the quality, which is the entire idea of a Roman trattoria and the reason the room feels less like a restaurant than like a family kitchen that happens to hold a licence.

Tucci used Rome to argue a single point: that Italian cooking is regional, seasonal and stubbornly local, and that the best of it is not complicated. Da Enzo is that argument served hot — four ingredients, no tricks, and a queue of Romans and visitors who know exactly what they came for.