There are meals you eat, and meals you remember eating. Then there are meals you are still sitting inside months later, even after you have paid and gone home and gone back to work and stared at enough spreadsheets to forget what hunger feels like.
La Roncola is a nothing-special restaurant in Grottaferrata, one of the hilltowns that ring Rome to the south, the Castelli Romani, the locals call them. No printed menu, no website worth finding. You choose: meat or fish. The kitchen decides the rest. The wine is local, Abruzzo, Montepulciano, poured without ceremony into thick glasses. The place is always full, always loud, and nobody there arrived with a reservation made three weeks in advance.
I went twice during October and November 2025, two months I spent living in Rome with Andrea, my Roman best friend. The second visit was a farewell dinner for Druso, one of Andrea’s oldest friends, heading to Antigua for work. There were twelve of us around a long table. It happened to be my last weekend in Rome as well, though I did not announce that. It felt too small a thing to say out loud next to Druso’s actual departure.
The food was excellent. But it was the table that did something to me, or maybe it was what the table showed me about the one I had been sitting at back home.
At the time, I was still employed. Working remotely from Andrea’s apartment during the week, real work, real deadlines, the full performance, and spending evenings and weekends doing what I had quietly started to think of as my actual life. I was looking for a way out of the job. Not desperately, not dramatically, but with the low-grade urgency of someone who has finally admitted to themselves that they are in the wrong place. Rome was not the reason. But Rome made the contrast very hard to ignore.
Sitting at that table in Grottaferrata, surrounded by a group of Italians I had known for eight weeks, I kept thinking about the gap between this and everything else. Not Italy versus Lebanon, that is too simple, and also wrong. The Romans are not so different from us. Andrea’s mother boils and freezes cicoria the same way my mother does. The morning sounds of Rome, waking up in his apartment, reminded me of sleeping at my grandmother’s in central Beirut. The loudness, the opinions, the insistence on feeding you properly, it is the same instinct wearing different clothes.
What I was feeling at La Roncola was something else. It was the specific relief of being at a table where nobody was performing. No agenda, no optics, no optimization. The amaro arrived because it always arrives. The bill was split without discussion. The conversation moved between jobs and travel and childhood and women with the ease of people who have known each other their entire lives, and somehow, improbably, they had made room for me in it.
I flew back to Beirut the following week, via Milano, then went back to the job, the screen, the weekly meetings. I did not resign until months later. But somewhere between the second glass of Montepulciano and the walk back down the hill that night, the question had sharpened into something I could not put back where I found it.
The chef, the one who runs the open fire grill, came out after his shift both times we were there. Still in his apron, smelling of smoke and char. He pulled up a chair and talked football with us like we had been coming in for years. We had not. But that is the thing about a place that has no reason to perform for you: it just lets you in.
THE SIDE
Why Romans eat better in the villages than in the city
The Castelli Romani — the ring of hilltowns south of Rome — have quietly remained what the city has slowly stopped being: places where locals still eat in restaurants made for locals. No tourist pricing, no translation menus, no ambient pressure to document the experience. The produce is hyperlocal, the wine is the region’s own Frascati and Cesanese, and the kitchen’s ego is proportional to its size — which is small. For anyone eating in Rome: rent a car one afternoon. Drive to Grottaferrata, Frascati, or Ariccia (for the porchetta alone, it is worth it). Order whatever they suggest. Pay without inspecting the bill. It will cost less than dinner in Trastevere and feel three times as real.
THE REC
La Roncola — Grottaferrata, Castelli Romani
No menu, no website, no fuss. Meat or fish — the kitchen handles the rest. Go for the secondi, stay for the amaro, and do not be in a hurry about either. Best reached by car. Bring someone you would miss.
No Fork(s) Given is written by Sam Sleem — Beirut-based, perpetually hungry, and recently liberated from spreadsheets. If someone forwarded this to you and you would like in, you know what to do.
Also: if this issue made you think about how you eat when you travel, I wrote a field guide on exactly that. Seven chapters, one method, no restaurant lists. The best meal of your life in a new city will not be found — it will be stumbled into. $15 at the link below.
How to Eat in a New City: samsleem.gumroad.com/l/qsekc