The worldwide culinary fame of Italy’s third-largest city boils down to one word: pizza. You can hardly hurl a tomato in the food’s purported birthplace — a scruffy, graffiti-stained port city of monumental Baroque buildings and narrow cobbled passageways — without hitting a gaggle of culinary pilgrims jockeying to enter one of the hundreds (or thousands, by some counts) of pizzerias.
But a slew of top-notch trattorias, osterias and ristoranti exist right alongside pizza titans like Sorbillo and Da Michele. Drawing on the cornucopia of livestock and produce from the fertile fields and coastal waters of the Campania region — cattle, goats, shellfish, wheat, artichokes, zucchini, figs, citrus fruits and more — these eateries dish out local inventions from mussel soup to homegrown pastas to limoncello.
So when you’re ready to foray beyond the overcrowded dens of dough and red sauce, here are five addresses in five neighborhoods offering both traditional and creative takes on beloved Neapolitan recipes and ingredients. Buon appetito.
History suffuses this homey, family-run restaurant tucked into the tight grid of streets that forms the working-class Quartieri Spagnoli district, a hillside zone where laundry seems to hang from every rusted wrought-iron balcony.
As opera arias and sentimental Italian ballads echo off the swirly, hand-painted, 18th-century wall tiles, a succession of time-honored Neapolitan dishes passes from the open kitchen to the worn wooden tables, where a mainly Italian clientele gobbles them down: fried eggplant, fried zucchini, fried rice balls, myriad meatballs and ziti under generous ladles of thick, tomato-beef Neapolitan ragù (also on sale in jars for 8.50 euros, or about $9.25).
The seafood offerings are equally worthy, including tender anchovies and cod drenched in a dense sauce of tomatoes, capers and olives. For a coda, you can balance salty with sweet thanks to a sticky baba au rhum — a favorite Franco-Polish dessert adopted in Napoli in the 18th century.
Osteria della Mattonella, Via Giovanni Nicotera 13. A three-course meal costs around 25 euros per person.
Tripperia O’Russ
Centuries ago, women from Napoli’s lower classes would gather outside royal residences in hopes of being granted the discarded entrails of the animals slaughtered for aristocrats’ banquets.
These days you need only go to one of the city’s tripe restaurants to taste this enduring favorite, traditionally referred to as cucina povera — the…
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