December 2005
Rome '05
by Celia Cheng
Piazza Trilussa 41
@ Via Del Moro 1/A
+39-06-5833-3920
My meal at Ferrara was in stark contrast with my first night’s dinner at Piperno. Ferrara is a modern enoteca located across the Tibor River in Trastevere. This part of town, once considered a no-man’s-land which housed fugitives, prostitutes and thieves outside the Roman city walls, is now considered the hip part of town, bustling with bars and restaurants where young people hang out at night and on the weekends.
When you walk into Ferrara you enter the bar area, which resembles a tapas bar in which the snacks and appetizers are all on display on the bar counter. So much good food at such close range is dangerously enticing. A couple of steps into the next room will reveal the restaurant and wine cellar. The restaurant is upstairs, above the cellar, but the two are intricately integrated, so you feel like you are eating in a restaurant within a cellar. The effect is warm and charming. The decor is simple, modern and elegant, with pristine white walls, rich wood ceiling beams, and wine bottles and wooden barrels as decorative elements. On the way to the restroom I could peer through steel grates in the wooden floor and see the wine storage below. The entire space is well-lit with warm lighting, well utilized, and beautifully designed to feel very cozy and chic at the same time. The wine menus come in large albums, one each for whites and reds, with the labels of each wine affixed to the pages so you can leaf through and study.
The funny thing about Ferrara was that after dinner I asked for a copy of the menu and they refused to give me one. I often ask for menus after a meal to make sure I have the correct elements to write about. The truth of the matter is that I don’t need a menu to write about a meal, but I am trying to get the facts straight and represent the restaurant’s food in the most accurate light. At Ferrara they explained that the chef owner is leery of people stealing her recipes. This of course was one of the lamest and funniest excuses I’ve heard. I asked for the menu, not her secret recipes. Besides, the fact is that if you really wanted to, by tasting the food, you can usually deconstruct the ingredients and try to recreate the dish at home. So I asked the waitress if she could write down what we had eaten and she came back and said that she could email it to me instead. Of course they never did. I’m wondering what could have happened to inspire this kind of paranoia. Overall, my dining experience was a pleasant one, but the evening certainly ended on a strange note.
Ferrara is a lively spot and for a second I didn’t feel like I was in Rome; I could have been in Barcelona or New York. You start off with a choice of either spumanti or prosecco and these wonderful little deep-fried bread balls. They were just “out of the oven,” so to speak, so the inside was perfectly soft. Noriko and I were trying to figure out exactly what it was that was inside. They seemed to be like deep-fried Japanese cuttlefish balls, although there was no fishy taste. Turned out they were deep-fried dough that simply tasted fresh beyond belief. The skins were not as thick as a beignet, but light and crisp with a beautiful golden tinge. I hesitate to liken them to doughnuts or munchkins because the consistency of the dough is entirely different – unlike the crumbly texture of doughnuts, these were denser, like bread, hence why I keep referring to them as bread balls. They were so easy to pop in your mouth, and obviously very popular, since by the time we asked for more they were all out.
The course I loved most at Ferrara was the homemade pasta with white truffles. Lucky for me I visited during truffle season and, boy, was I excited. The first day I arrived, Noriko took me to an outdoor market and we hit the fungi stand first. Italian porcinis were at the end of the season but there were large, beautiful Spanish porcinis available. We got some of those as well as a white truffle to have with the risotto Stefano was going to prepare for lunch. The white and black truffles sat unassumingly in their separate jars next to each other, but when the mushroom man opened the jar, the intoxicating aroma of truffles escaped out into the open air. It was like a drug and I couldn’t get enough of it. So in the end I had two meals with white truffles: a home cooked Villanti risotto and the Ferrara pasta.
The pasta itself was an egg noodle lightly dressed with a little cream and the wonderfully thin shavings of white truffles. The key to the white truffle is that since the taste and smell are so strong, you don’t need much else to go with it, nor should it compete with any other flavorful ingredient. This simple pasta brought out the best in the truffles and although the appetizers that preceded and the fowl entrée that followed were good, I will not forget this pasta. White truffles are truly magical.
Ferarra is a wonderfully relaxing wine bar that I would love to come back to, even just to sit at the bar in the front. That might even be the best bet, to ensure that I have access to all the deep-fried bread balls that I want. Well, and also to enjoy some good wine, marvelous food and the delightful company of friends, with everyone at the bar having a merry time.
