Beyond pizza: Extraordinary seafood and vegetables make Neapolitan food special

You could easily spend an entire holiday in Naples eating nothing but pizza, pastries, and street food and still come home raving about the quality of the food. This, however, is a city that delivers on every culinary level, and its proper restaurants deserve some attention, too. Especially if you love fresh produce and seafood. 

Like the rest of Italy, Neapolitan food favours simple preparations of top quality ingredients. plenty of pasta, which you can have the traditional way as a starter before your meat, or as a main course. Vegetables tend to come as side dishes, not assembled onto a main course plate with multiple elements. Neapolitans join their fellow Italians in preferring what’s local, and seasonal.

Like most Italians, they’ll tell you that THEIR local ingredients are better than other regions … and here they may have a point. Abundant sunshine, gentle breezes and the notoriously fecund volcanic soil produce exquisite fruit and vegetables. Stop to admire a greengrocer’s stand here and you’ll be gazing at something just as worthy of veneration as the city’s art. They grow varieties distinctive to the area, San Marzano tomatoes being the most well known. We were visiting in high season for friarelli (known as broccoli rabe in the States), a green somewhere between tender-stem broccoli and cavolo nero, and some gorgeous, red-tinged artichokes I’d never seen before. All this fabulous fruit and veg doesn’t mean, however, that you’ll always be eating healthily. The Neapolitans are so fond of deep frying things you’d think they were twinned with Glasgow.

This is also the point on the Italian peninsula where people start to get really serious about desserts. Omnipresent Italian gelato and tiramisu has competition here from mouth-watering cakes, pastries, tarts, and biscuits. We can thank medieval Arab occupation for the love of pastry, and centuries under Spanish rule for easy access to sugar and chocolate coming in from the new world.

In fact, many argue that the magnificence of Southern Italian food is a direct consequence of thousands of years of imperialist foreigners running the place, going all the way back to Greek merchants and then to Romans established the whole coast as a destination for luxury dining.

When it came to booking restaurants in modern Naples, we had a secret weapon named Nicola. A colleague of one of the girls on our trip, he was excited to arrange bookings for us at a series of restaurants over the course of our visit so that we could try all aspects of Neapolitan dining: the pizzerias (already covered here), the trendy spots, the humble local joints and the elegant retreats. I doubt you’ll get a bad meal anywhere in Naples, but Nicola ensured that we saw all sides of this vibrant city’s food scene. My only regret? Large portions and travelling companions who were all avoiding desserts meant I left sweets unexplored at our restaurant choices.

It was the humble neighbourhood restaurant that stole my heart, and it’s the first one I’d return to. Locanda Monacone is deep inside Rione Sanità, the former rough neighbourhood now rehabilitated into a popular residential area for creative types. It’s the destination for visitors who want a more local experience. The restaurant is proud to be a long-standing occupant of the neighbourhood; contributing to its revival with local employment. Its small, ground-floor dining room is dominated by a tile mural of Catholic saints under a barrel vault. It looks like it’s been unchanged for centuries.

Our expectations were low when we arrived, however, because that charming space was taken by a private party and we were ushered to a tiny landing upstairs with three tables outside of the kitchen. We feared the staff would ignore us and we’d be wildly irritated by the noises below and the traffic of servers from the kitchen. Not at all! The staff seemed to redouble their efforts, really making a fuss over us. By the end of the evening we were dancing with them and the downstairs party-goers to the birthday boy’s live band. And the food! Weeks later, I’m still dreaming about the plate of fritto misto (a range of deep-fried delights) followed by linguini with fresh artichokes and chunks of sweet, crispy pancetta that practically brought tears of joy to my eyes. There was an exceptional local wine list and the waiters here seemed better informed about, and more willing to discuss, options than the servers at most of the more expensive places we went. I hope that somewhere in my family history there’s a link between my line and Benito Ferrara, whose label served up a wonderfully crisp, lively Greco du Tufo to perfectly counter that rich food. 

Our most elegant experience was at TransAtlantico, a hotel and restaurant nestled beneath the Castel dell’Ovo with harbour-side tables looking over yachts and the Naples seafront with Vesuvius hanging in the background. The decor is all inspired by trans-Atlantic liners of the ‘20s and ‘30s, so there’s a lovely atmosphere inside. But for most of the year you’ll want to reserve one of those outside tables. This is the kind of place designed for that romantic dream date, but it’s pretty darned good with your girlfriends, too.

As appropriate to its location, TransAtlantico is all about the seafood. Prawns in tomato sauce, tuna tartare and a dish of lemon-laced courgettes all won raves, but I’m confident my octopus on a bed of caponata was the dish of the night. Each component part … octopus, aubergine, onion, tomato … seemed the exemplar of its individual taste, yet married together for a coherent whole. If there was one dish the whole trip that made me sigh “you just don’t get fresh tomatoes like this anywhere else” it was this one. (Top photo)

It’s here that I also got to try a white wine I’ve been reading about for years: lacryma christi. If you love both wine and history, it’s hard to resist the idea that this is as close to the wine preferred by the Ancient Romans as you can get, and that it’s been praised in literature for centuries by writers as diverse as Voltaire, Hawthorne and Marlow. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a rich, heavy white … along the same lines as a well-aged Burgundian Chardonnay … but has a distinctive flavour profile of grass, white peach and a hint of almond. I was planning to bring some bottles home but the wine shop in Rione Sanità was closed on our departure day.

If you want to feel part of the hip and trendy scene in Naples, head to Cap’Alice. Like TransAtlantico, thisis in the upscale part of town along the coast, west of the historic centre. But where TransAtlantico’s position on the water looking toward all the great 19th century hotels speaks of a history of grand tourism, this place is on a small lane that rises through the Chiaia neighbourhood and screams “local”. You wouldn’t find without looking for it.

The food and wine was good, the people watching better. The fried calamari we shared as a starter was excellent. My tuna crusted in almonds was beautiful, but the report back on the other mains was competent, not exceptional. The wine list was interesting and the bottles we sampled were top-notch, but given that the place is known as a wine bar we were disappointed not to get more insight and guidance from the staf. Overall, service was really stretched and I suspect we did not get the best from the place because it was Friday night. The compensation was watching a parade of well-dressed locals demonstrating the Neapolitan exuberance for life. I’m not sure this was worth the effort to go all the way across town, but if I were staying in this neighbourhood I would try Cap’Alice again, on a weeknight, as well as sampling other places on this bustling little lane.

For dining with beautiful foreigners, of course, it was off to Capri. We enjoyed a long, relaxing lunch at Capanna in the main town, one of those understated but classic stalwarts plastered with photos of all the famous people who have eaten there. The interior is a cool, elegant mix of white walls, painted tiles, and potted plants, with tropical-themed plates hand-painted for the restaurant. Temperatures were mild when we visited but I can imagine what a refugee this would be from the blazing heat of high summer.

La Capannina is on a quiet lane a bit back from the main tourist drag; out taxi driver had tipped it to us when we asked him for food the locals really rated, then validated by the fact that one of the girls had an excellent meal ere on an earlier trip. It’s no bargain … at €71 each it was our most expensive meals on our trip … but that’s Capri. And our love of good wine means we’re inevitably spending as much on drinks as food.

For the premium price you get gracefully attentive service, an elegantly peaceful environment and glorious food. Their specialty of bufala mozzarella-stuffed ravioli earned eye rolls of appreciation around the table. The girls thought the Loggia della Sera Greco di Tufo was the best example of this local variety that we drank. I, however, was most impressed by a spaghetti dish with prawns in a lemon sauce. According to the waitress, the secret is lemoncello kneaded into the pasta. The flavour profile was so impressive I tried to make it as soon as I got home. My pasta was pretty good, but my sauce came nowhere near the light creaminess of theirs. The dish was memorable enough that I’ll keep trying. Perfecting the recipe is more likely than a quick return to Capri.

Honorable mentions:

Caffetteria Tonya: While I wouldn’t go out of my way to get here … I am sure there are thousands of places like this across Naples … Tonya was a great example of the neighbourhood Italian cafe. This is also why breakfast is so often optional in Italian lodging. Culturally, people prefer having their coffee and cornetto (the Italian version of a croissant) in public. I went here every morning, often sitting for an hour reading or sketching with my coffee. By the third day the two guys who worked there knew my order (cappuccino, cornetto filled with crema di pistacchio). It was fascinating to see the regular parade of locals, and how the barman took trays of coffee up and down the street for other shopkeepers. No paper cups here: proper glass and china even though he was crossing uneven paving stones and dodging speeding scooters. The guys knew the names not just of the locals, but of their dogs. Every day we saw these pillars of the community open up at 8am and roll up the shutters around 8pm. 

Tesoreria: This exquisite cocktail bar in the Galleria Principe di Napoli is worth a special trip, so beautiful are its interiors and so skilled its bartenders. The restaurant in its atmospheric, groin-vaulted cellars looked intriguing and I would have loved to try it, but all of our dining opportunities were booked up. Here’s yet another excuse to consider a return trip to Naples.