Bologna

The Learned, The Fat, The Red. But Mostly The Fat

It is one thing to land in a city you don’t know, with no map, no reservations, and no idea where you’re going. It’s another to land in a city you don’t know, and find people decked out in strange and extravagant headgear. It is delightful, but also disorienting, as if you’d shown up at your friend’s house expecting a quiet chat and maybe a bit of pasta, only to find a full-fledged costume party underway. 

I was a few minutes into my arrival in central Bologna, and I kept coming across people wearing plants in their hair. A young woman in a purple dress with roses wrapped around her shiny hair; another, older and beaming, with sunflowers wreathed around dark curls; a man whose crown of laurel leaves made him look like a Roman emperor. 

They made the  business of hotel-seeking more pleasant, even after I struck out on my first two attempts. At the first, the receptionist heralded the bella vista as reason for a 250 euro charge, but opened the door onto a dark room with formica floors, a polyester bedspread, and a single, tiny window; the “view” turned out to be of a dried up canal. At the second, the woman at the desk told me there was indeed one room left, but that I could only book it online. No, she could not do that for me.

The third place was just right: central location, airy room with a window that overlooked rooftops, reasonable price. The map I got at reception heralded Bologna’s three nicknames: la dotta, la grassa, la rossa. 

The first, which translates as ‘the learned,’ is a reference to the city’s university, which is the world’s oldest, and has the claim to fame of educating both Dante and Umberto Eco. The floral crowns, it turned out, were part of that history. When I stopped three friends who were seated on the steps of a building drinking prosecco, Nicola— whose bayleaf crown made him look like he belonged in a Caravaggio painting—explained they were for graduation; he had just received his degree in philosophy. 

Who wore it best?

I congratulated him, and told him that I thought the crowns were much more attractive than the mortarboards graduates wear in the US. “Yeah, but you get to throw yours in the air,” Nicola replied. Then he paused, pensive as the philosopher he now officially was. “Although it is true that we can cook ours.”

The ‘rossa,’ or red, in Bologna’s nickname refers both to the bricks that give the city its characteristic tint and to its reputation as a bastion of leftwing politics. This latter wasn’t easily evident. It’s true that I came across the stirring monument to local partisans killed in the second world war: row upon row of their identification photos, each one no bigger than a credit card, filling two massive walls. And I suppose it’s not every city where the bars advertise themselves with quotes from Hannah Arendt. 

But the only real political action I witnessed was a few dozen people shouting ‘Assassin!’ at the shuttered, second-story windows of a building; upstairs, apparently, the former Italian health minister was presenting his latest book. One of the protesters told me they were angry because the ex-minister had forced people to get vaccines, forced them to stay home from work, forced them to wear masks “even if they had breathing problems.” They probably weren’t anarcho-syndicalists, in other words. 

But Bologna the Fat? That was easy to see. Bologna is the home of mortadella, which Americans actually call bologna, even though their version is the palest of imitations. It is the home of ragù, which not only Americans but pretty much everyone who isn’t Italian calls bolognese. It is home of lasagna, and of tortellini en brodo. And as the capital of the region that contains Parma, it has a reasonable claim to both parmigiano and prosciutto. 

It is perhaps the most food-focused place I have ever been, and that’s saying something. According to the local chamber of commerce, there is one restaurant or bar for every 37 inhabitants in the city center, and Bologna is in fact so overwhelmed with places to eat that the government suspended licenses for new food businesses four years ago. Walking through the streets reminded me of a line from a Geoff Dyer book comparing Italians and children: both need to eat every 40 minutes or so. Everyone in Bologna, it seemed, was always putting something in their mouths. 

And so, during my first hours in the city, I found myself confronted with the weightiest of problems, namely: where to have lunch. Eventually I chose a place based solely on the fact that when I had passed it earlier that morning, the elderly chef had been sitting alone at a table in the window, paper toque on his head, a glass of red wine in front of him. 

It turned out to be inviting, with bottles of wine and jars of peppers for decor and a clientele that looked to be half local students, half elderly couples with nothing to say to each other. The welcoming server, whom I took to be the chef’s wife, brought me a bean soup with sautéed chicory greens and a plate of tagliatelle al ragù. It was delicious. 

And yet. It wasn’t quite delicious enough to knock the FOMO out of me. A nagging question began to form in my head, the beginning of what would turn into a full-blown, Bologna-induced, existential crisis. What if there were someplace better? And more to the point: without my phone to guide me, how would I know? 

This is what food internet has done to those of us who care about eating. Before I started this newsletter, even the shortest trip would have entailed a serious amount of research. I would have perused lists, and checked out apps (including this very good one created by my friend Kenneth). I would have gone to websites to look at menus, possibly even deciding then which specific dishes I would order. I would search instagram to see what those dishes looked like. I would do this not just for restaurants, but for coffee, bakeries, wine bars, gelato, even street food stalls. From this information, I would compile a list, make a few reservations, map out a route. 

And in this way, I would have found myself confronting the classic dilemma of the traveling food-lover. On the one hand, my preparation would help me ensure I ate well, and diminished the risk of “wasting” a meal. But by eating only in places that had been thoroughly vetted by other people who also traveled for food, I was also ensuring that I would encounter other people like me, which is to say, tourists. And the presence of tourists, or at least enough tourists, somehow has a way of eroding authenticity, that notion that is impossible to define, yet which so many of us insist we want. As a result, most of us end up fixated on a fantasy: the perfect restaurant known only to locals but that somehow we ‘discover.’

I recognize this, both the complexity and the folly. And yet, I couldn’t escape the idea that a bad meal in Bologna—Bologna the Fat; Bologna the birthplace of ragù and mortadella and lasagna— would be a special kind of tragedy. Clearly,  I needed a strategy. 

I decided to ask people. I would focus only on locals, and because specificity tends to clarify the mind, I would ask only after a single, renowned dish: what is the best place for ragù? I formulated this question knowing full well that ragù is something eaten at home, and that most people would respond by saying “at my mom’s house.” But if you go to a city like Bologna and start asking locals what their favorite restaurant in general is, they’re going to send you either to an Asian place or to someplace expensive that they think tourists like. A request for a specific local dish would get me closer to the authentic, I thought. Whatever that is.

I asked everyone I could. The friendly receptionist at my hotel, and his surly late-night replacement. Two stylish women friends who had just bumped into each other on the street. The owner of a drogheria crammed with an unlikely mix of candy and cleaning products whose ancestors had founded the shop in the 1600s. A young dude collecting signatures for Amnesty International. A woman on a smoke break outside the jewelry shop where she worked. Two old guys on a bench.  

Not one of them seemed the least bit taken aback by a stranger asking in hideously broken Italian for their favorite restaurant for ragù, and each addressed the question with the gravity it deserved. Many, it is true, told me that their mother made the best. But then, invariably, they came up with a name.

I had expected that gradually, a consensus would emerge, or if not complete agreement, at least some heavily weighted favorites. That did not happen. I ended up with a list of about a dozen names, and I did not have a dozen meals to eat in Bologna, not even if I counted breakfast, and I was not eating ragù for breakfast. I’ll be honest: it made me want my phone. In fact, at no point in my unplugged travels thus far, not even when I was lost late at night in Hamburg, had I wanted it more. My hands practically itched for that reassuring sensation of fingertips on glass that would allow me to narrow down my choices. 

Instead, I walked, in the hopes that the visuals would give me useful information. In the process, I passed a few places that had clearly made it onto the international circuit. One was an osteria with signs in English instructing the hordes of folks staring at their phones outside where they should stand as they waited for their turn. Another was a pizza place that had pasted pages of the local newspaper to the wall outside so that people would have something to read while they waited, which suggested that at least some of those buying lining up for their sourdough pizza were Italian, although the fact that it was sourdough pizza did not. I scoffed at the long line had formed outside a brightly-lit, hole-in-the-wall selling some kind of ‘artisanal’ mortadella sandwiches. These all, I decided, were precisely what I was not looking for: places made popular by and for foreign travelers.

Around dinner time, I found myself near a place named by the two old guys on the bench that looked perfect–wood-panelled walls, and a menu whose antipasti selection consisted of three items: mortadella, prosciutto, or mortadella and prosciutto. The restaurant was fully booked, but I have been around southern European cultures long enough to know that ‘not possible’ is really just the opening sally in a complex negotiation designed to weed out the uncommitted. 

“Really? Nothing?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Niente.”

“I’ll be out really fast,” I promised. 

“Mi dispiace, signora.”

I noticed, however, that he was reaching for the reservation book.

He scanned the page and shook his head. ‘No. Not possible.’

I didn’t move. 

At first imperceptibly, and then perceptibly, his head shake transitioned into a shrug.  “Ok, Maybe possible.” 

I didn’t move.

“Yes, possible. But 9pm, finito.”

I ordered the tagliatelle al ragu. It was delicious. 

The next day, my dear friends Mary Alice and Max drove in from the house they were renting in the Emilian countryside. Gamely, considering they run a wine and cheese shop (which you should definitely check out should you find yourself in Blue Hill, Maine), Mary Alice and Max agreed to go along with my self-imposed restaurant selection protocol. I chose the particular osteria where we would have lunch from among my random strangers’ suggestions because it was far enough from the city center to mitigate the likelihood of it being a tourist hotspot. 

My hunch was right. Rustic interior with cooking tools on the wall; young, t-shirt-clad waiter who crowded the three of us around a tiny wooden table; a mix of Italians to foreigners that was probably around 70%-30%. We ordered fresh ricotta and fried crescentine that came to the table crisp and finger-burning, and drank a house red that was happily on the plonky side. For mains, I had the tagliatelle al ragù bianco, which is bianco because it is made without tomato paste. It was delicious.

We spent the rest of the day in other food- and drink-related pursuits. We ran to the market so that my friends could buy artichokes and salumi to take back to the countryside. We went to the pasta shop to buy fresh tortellini handmade by an actual Pasta Granny. We got coffee, and walked to the shop whose shelves were stocked entirely by great wheels of parmigiano. We ran the gauntlet of all things edible that is the Quadrilatero. And then they took me to a place known to them from previous trips to Bologna that was unlike anyplace I had ever been. 

600 years, and still going strong

It was called an osteria, but it didn’t serve any food; if you want to eat, you either bring snacks with you, or have them delivered from someplace nearby (at one point, a waitress from a café next door rushed in with a platter of sandwiches for a table of very rowdy men). We ordered glasses of pignoletto, and Max gave me the lowdown. “It’s the oldest osteria in Bologna,” he said. “And yeah, it’s on everyone’s list. But it’s still pretty great.”

It’s true: it was wonderful. We were not the only tourists, but nor were there only tourists. One long table of men, who drank  from an accumulation of bottles and shouted at the football match on tv seemed especially comfortable. But even for us first timers, there is something about day drinking with friends in a place where people have been doing the same for roughly 600 years that makes it feel profound. 

It had only been about an hour since our last meal, and none of us was the least bit hungry, but Max unwrapped the mortadella he had bought earlier, and we dug in. It was my second day in Bologna, and already I had succumbed to round-the-clock eating. 

It’s not like there was nothing else to do. I saw some breathtaking frescoes at the Oratorio de Santa Cecilia and strolled, enchanted, through the city’s many, many porticos. I browsed, delighted, at the Sala Borsa, the ornate public library right on Piazza Maggiore that also functions as an ad hoc community center; I gawped at the artwork in a bunch of churches. I spent an enthralled if mildly disturbed morning in the Museo Poggi among the rows of waxwork uteruses in various phases of gestation.

But there was simply so much in Bologna that was good to eat. For my final dinner, I chose a place that both Mary Alice and one of the old guys on the bench had recommended. There were, to be honest, quite a number of tourists there, more tourists than Italians, and for a moment I feared I had made a mistake. But I knew I was in good hands as soon as my antipasto arrived: artichokes shaved thin and dressed with just enough lemon to cut through the sweet funk of the bresaola. I couldn’t face another tagliatelle al ragù, so I ordered that other classic, tortellini en brodo, which arrived like some kind of Platonic ideal of noodles and soup: the broth rich yet light, the pasta tender and stuffed with a deeply savory filling redolent with spices. It was delicious. 

So maybe the food-lover’s dilemma was unresolvable. Every one of the meals I ate in Bologna was wonderful, and I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite. In any case, it is folly to label something so subjective as taste as the best of anything, just, as I had been forced to recognize, it is folly to equate authenticity with ‘undiscovered by outsiders.’ Maybe the trick is to just stop worrying about it, and enjoy the meal in front of you. 

Before I left for the airport the next day, I went back to the mortadella sandwich place. I got there precisely when it opened at noon, and already there was enough of a line that I nearly turned on my heel. But I considered Bologna’s lessons and tamed my impulses long enough to order. The bread was warm, and the straciatella oozed slightly onto a towering heap of shaved mortadella. Do I need to say it? It was delicious.

The Addresses

Below, paid subscribers will find a list of the places where I ate, drank, and stayed in Bologna. But, a gentle reminder: wouldn’t it be more fun to find your own? 

Hotels

Hotel Cavour. Via Goito 4. Couldn’t be more central, with a friendly staff (minus one exception!), nice breakfast, and bright, recently renovated rooms. Doubles 129 euros.

Restaurants, bars, cafés, etc

Ristoro del Meridione. Via delle Belle Arti, 6f. Homey dining room, kind service, and tasty staples supplemented with some interesting additions.

Ristorante Grassilli, Via dall Luzzo, 3d A classic in the center, slightly more formal, where the menu is short, extremely bolognese, and very well executed.

Osteria al 15, Mirasole 15. Lovely place, where the welcome is warm and the menu—though strong on local favorites—shows a tiny bit more variety. The fried crescentine and the white ragu are both stand-outs.

Trattoria Leonida, Vicolo Alemagna 2. The tortellini en brodo of my dreams, everything else exceptionally well made as well. Plus an elderly owner still making the rounds to check in on every guest.

Osteria del Sole, Vicolo Ranocchi 1D. The oldest tavern in Bologna dates back to the 1400s, doesn’t serve food (though you can bring your own), and is a great and lively place to try local wines.

Cremeria Mascarella. Via Mascarella 30B. Wonderful gelateria where they get fresh milk and cream delivered direct from the farm twice a week, and the short, manageable list of flavors is filled with some gems.

Vineria Favalli, Via Santo Stefano, 5a. A natural wine bar right in the heart of the aperitivo strip, perfect for interesting wines, good people watching, and some exceptionally crunchy taralli.

Rui, Via dei Ruini, 1a. A pretty corner café with a good selection of beautiful pastries. Extra points for the small glass of water that comes with your cappuccino.

La Sfogline, Via Belvedere 7B. Gorgeous stuffed fresh pasta made by Renata Zappoli and her daughters.

Tigelleria Tigellino Via Calzoleria, 1C A kind of fast-food takeaway place for the small, Emilia-Romagnia flatbreads called tigelle that are kind of like an Italian blini and come stuffed with prosciutto, cheese, and other usual suspects. They are delicious just off the griddle

MO Mortadella Lab, Via San Vitale 4f. Takeaway shop serving warm and not entirely traditional mortadella sandwiches in a variety of combinations. No place to sit, but a lot of people bring theirs to the wall close to the Garisenda towers and eat them there.