A Roman Holiday: winter in the Eternal City
In 2019, Katrina and Josh flew to Rome to put the finishing touches on a menu and restaurant set that had been in production for a couple of months before the end of the year. Maybe the most interesting fact about this particular menu, is that for the first time, the Juliet staff were operating the restaurant on their own, with instructions and recipes they had never seen before (although their understanding of Juliet style by that point made them easy to navigate), which the owners were out of the country. On holiday.
The room is set with actual Roman street art, most of it coming from the neighborhood of Ostiense. Ostiense is a few blocks from the working class neighborhood of Testaccio, where Katrina and Josh stayed. Testaccio is home to a large and renowned open market. One of the items on the a la carte version of this menu, the sandwich L’Alesso, is based on a sandwich from that market, from the famous, decades old, sandwich stall, Mordi e Vai, owned by Sergio Esposito.
The prix fixe menu is loosely based on the tradition of Italian dining that extends the meal over many courses in a defined progression. Antipasti, Zuppe, Primi, Secondi e Contorni, Dolci. The dishes and ingredients are representative of many truly Roman (rather than simply Italian) specialties and traditions, both modern and ancient.
Tune in to Roman Holiday.
The poem accompanying the menu is written in both Italian and English. Josh’s English is about 8,000 times stronger than his Italian. However, they are loosely the same. The themes of the poem are related to religious or spiritual discovery a little bit, as is fitting for Rome (home to the Vatican), but is intentionally non denominational, with salt, yes edible old salt, taking on an auspicious role. (and you thought your chefs harping on about salted not salty was just a random development… they were guiding us all to the opening of Roman).
But back to the food, for a minute.
A Roman Holiday: Winter in the Eternal City is a dream, no...a wish. It is an invitation to come in from the cold and be comforted (similarly to our first winter traditional menu, Love for Lyon: Union Square Bouchon), drawing inspiration mainly from trattoria style restaurants (which you might consider a sort of Roman answer to the Parisian Bistro...which is where we all really want to be, always, but especially when it is 28 degrees).
The name of the menu is gently lifted from the classic movie, Roman Holiday. In preparation for the first opening of our A Roman Holiday, Katrina and Josh visited the site of the filming of that movie, CineCitta (in English: film city), in Rome. CineCitta is still the largest film studio in Italy, and is popular with international directors as well (Gangs of New York, and HBO’s Rome were filmed there). (Also on this trip, in Sicily, Katrina and Josh visited the theater that was the on location filming site for Cinema Paradiso, but that’s not relevant here).
