Do you remember them at Buon Ricordo Restaurants? Those with ceramic plates from Deruta hung on the wall, that if you were a good customer, would they give it to you as well? Well yes, they still exist and in Rome, in the heart of Tor Pignattara, Euphrosine was born, tavern-trattoria that took its cue from this glorious tradition, immediately applying to the Association of Buon Ricordo restaurants, which at the moment in Rome has only the mythological Taberna dei Gracchi and Checchino associated since 1887.

The restaurant of the past

The dishes hanging on the wall from Eufrosino are already there, but for now they are those of other restaurants scattered throughout Italy, purchased in the markets to make furnishings. The furniture, in fact, is that of a restaurant of the past, with the dark wood boiserie, the green pool table lamps, old-fashioned tables and chairs, not to mention the mise en place, the penalty checkered tablecloth is missing , but each place is marked by a placemat of those laced with a tray of the eighties pastas.

In short, the declared intention is to to take a dip in the past, at the time when finding Buon Ricordo ceramic plates was a guarantee of quality. As the patron Marco Pucciotti says "the restaurants of good memories, if you think about it, were the beginnings of the gastronomic guides: those who were part of it had a kind of seal that guaranteed that rustic, but good cuisine was eaten there".

For the uninitiated, Euphrosine is the patron saint of cooks. But what do you eat at Euphrosine? Rustic Italian cuisine, but good, in fact, without a precise regional reference and without frills, apart from the excellent technique of the chef Paolo D’Ercole. «We don't want to be a Roman trattoria, we don't want to enter the cliché of the most holy trinity carbonara-cacioepepe-amatriciana found throughout Rome. Here the inspiration comes from the huge catalog of recipes from everyone's grandmothers. " So you go from the family cookbook of chef Paolo D’Ercole, his partner, Pucciotti himself and even customers, who have already started to propose to the chef to try their madeleine.

The menu changes every 3-4 months and we tried it in winter, so it is likely that we will not find the dishes that hit us soon. However, the cardoon parmigiana deserves a mention, such as the guinea fowl pie and the timbale of tortellini full of cream, which tickles the memories of those who lived them dangerously (for coronaries) in the eighties.

And then there is the bread, which is part of the synergy that accompanies Euphrosine and his different twin, A Rota, or the Roman pizzeria that is next door. The two rooms are connected by a couple of passages, one for the staff and one for the "services" or bathrooms that are shared. The continuity ends here, because the two rooms are furnished in a completely different way, as if to underline their caesura, right from the light that if from Eufrosino it is heated by the wooden walls, from A Rota it is almost blinding. The bread, we said, is prepared by the golden hands of Sami El Sabawy, pizza maker and baker, who on one hand stretches out round a rolling pin and on the other prepares loaves ready to become a shoe.

To keep the ranks of this complex narrative of recovery of tradition, Italian on the one hand, very Roman on the other, as was anticipated is the patron Marco Pucciotti, old fox of the restaurant that with its many openings has changed the face of the Appio neighborhood Tuscolano (Epirus, Sbanco, Blind Pig, Barley Wine). With this new double opening in the Tor Pignattara district, Tor Pigna for friends has launched onto new ground of conquest, even if "the town hall is the same", he points out. And, apparently, despite the complexity of an even more popular neighborhood than those in which it has moved so far, as well as one of the most multi-ethnic in the capital, Pucciotti has achieved yet another critical and public success.