Trimani Wine Bar
Via Cernaia, 37b
00185 Roma
Italy
Tel. +39 06 4469630
The dishes
Bresaola
Poached egg with Parmigiano Reggiano cream (uovo poché alla crema di Parmigiano Reggiano)
Steak tartare of Piedmontese beef (tartare di manzo piemontese)
Spicy and aromatic chicken with Indian rice (pollo al curry speziato piccante con riso indiano)
Apple cake with lemon curd (tortino alle mele con lemon curd)
The Trimani Wine Bar in Rome is one of the city’s most dependable watering holes: even better, it also serves rock-solid food to go along with all that liquid wealth. Clearly this is a bastion of traditional Roman and Italian cooking, with an emphasis on local products and recipes faithful to the originals. Even those dishes that would seem completely international (because in fact they are) and out of place at the bistro, such as for example the spicy and aromatic chicken with Indian rice (the follow-up to the Wine Bar’s excellent and much-loved chicken curry with rice dish) is actually much more “Roman” than you’d think, or know. In fact, chicken curry with rice was, is, a long-time staple of Italian restaurants, gracing the menus of the dining establishments of Rome and elsewhere since decades, a nod to an ethnic cuisine that Italy never much embraced and was literally not to be found anywhere as recently as twenty years ago. So there was always a chicken curry dish on the menus, much like there might have been penne in vodka sauce just about everywhere too. The latter dish, which you hardly see anywhere anymore, was a nod to a specific time in Italian cuisine when the use of heavy cream was more prevalent than it is today: it represents, just like the chicken curry, a wink to days gone by, but they are in fact dishes that are very much part of the fabric of the past forty years of dining out in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.
