Ristorante Nuova Roma

The best place to eat in Bologna isn’t even in Bologna.

Despite sitting at the gastronomic centre of Emilia-Romana (and therefore Italy, and therefore the World) for hundreds of years, Bologna has only recently emerged as a zeitgeisty weekend destination, taking on the mantle from the likes of Seville and Lisbon. (Obrigado for your service, amigo). Right now, Bologna is jostling with Marseille for eat-drink-wander supremacy, but it has the minerals to come out on top. The French city may have the Calanque, but what power is that in the face of a bowl of tortellini-in-brodo?

I first went to Bologna in September ‘23 during a longer trip to Tuscany. We drove up, parked somewhere subterranean and set about eating our way across the city. Lasagne, piadina, tigelle, mortadella, prosciutto; gallons of robust, soupy wine that warms the belly… then perhaps a deserved coronary incident. I was determined to get the most out of my calorific intake, and had consulted various blogs, lists and review sites to mitigate for a dud-less itinerary.

The best ragu, allegedly, was at Osteria Dell’Orsa, so we made the pilgrimage and queued dutifully in the scorching alley outside. When we finally picked up our cutlery, we found the dish wanting; the lasagna a little drab. Where were the fireworks, the ineffable mama-cucina mystique? I’m not sure how life-changing I expected meat sauce to really be, but it was, as I’ve had often before, just a really solid spag bol.

One Bolognese friend had sent me a comprehensive list of her best spots in town, and top of the list was Osteria del Sole, a bar just off the Via Pescherie Vecchie market. It’s a boozer, really, but you gather up sundries from the stalls outside and bring them in to ballast all the wine. 

Bologna is a university town and there's a hint of student abandon, but moreover, Del Sole feels a bit wild, like the ominous corner of a Caravaggio bar scene. There’s a bauble-lit courtyard for smokers, but people light up inside anyway, and plain-clothed staff move through the throng dropping off carafes and barking jokes like the innsmen of old. In the sweat of an August night, the room is alive.

You can eat at Del Sole, but it’s not exactly a restaurant. And though there were unbeatable dishes over the course of the next 48 hours, there wasn’t one overall meal in the city that really made me feel like I’d arrived at an epicurean nexus. (Bologna, I should say, is achingly beautiful and surprisingly cool, and it has a rustic, medieval feeling that you can’t find in Rome or Venice. If you haven’t been, you should go.)

As a coda to her list, that Bolognese friend said that if I had a car, and the inclination, I should try to get out to Ristorante Nuova Roma in the hills in the foothills of the Apennine mountains just west of the city. It was the best place to eat, she said. We stopped in for lunch on the way back to Tuscany.

From the road, the two-story building doesn’t look like much - it’s the kind of unremarkable eatery you might see on the side of any Mitteleuropean road. But within, it is the very zenith of kitsch mid-century Italian design. Marble floor, wood panel walls; a checkerboard ceiling with a large, slow moving electric fan at its centre. Crisp white tablecloths, a well-stocked (but largely untouched) drinks trolley in the middle of the room, and lace curtains shielding those within from the early Autumn sun. It could be 1974 and you’d never know.

A burly, middle-aged man had shown us to the table, but it was his nonna that waited on us. We ordered a bottle of pignoletto frizzante (€7) that was made a few miles away and settled into the menu. Other than us, there was a young family with a baby dressed smart for lunch, and an unspeaking middle-aged couple that shared only the occasional smile. In one corner, three thick-necked businessmen sat at a table laden with bread and ragu, scheming.

We ordered fried slices of polenta topped with squacquerone cheese, porcini mushrooms, and pancetta arrotolata, and little flat panini stuffed with mortadella and flecked with flakey salt. Then pasta - tortellini in brodo, torellini with ricotta and butter, and a prosciutto ragu. Then Bistecca, and finally, the most astronomically good panna cotta I have ever had. We literally giggled as we ate, dumbstruck by its taught but yielding physique and delicate decadence.

We sat back with espresso, beaming, and took it all in. Somehow, on a roadside 20km from the Piazza Maggiore, we had found the Bolognese lunch we were looking for.

I have been back to Ristorante Nuova Roma twice since that first trip, and plan to stop in again in just a few weeks. The seasons shift and my world changes, but that room is always the same, and the food is always exactly what you want it to be. And the nonna’s always there, and the businessmen, too.