Best Italian Restaurants in Rome 2026
By Renzo Tanao, Craft & Kitchen Editor · Published · Updated
The tell in a Roman kitchen is the gricia: four ingredients, no cream, and a sauce that only emulsifies if the guanciale is rendered exactly right. On Piazza Navona you will pay €38 for a carbonara loosened with cream and bacon; fifteen minutes west on Via dei Giubbonari, Roscioli serves the version Romans grew up on for €18. The eight rooms below skip the postcard addresses: three Michelin stars on a Monte Mario hilltop, a two-star above the Tiber, a one-star framed by the Colosseum, and four trattorie that have outcooked every trend since the war.
Eight Roman Tables Worth the Reservation
Start with the fagottelli. Heinz Beck seals carbonara — egg, Pecorino, guanciale, pepper — as a hot liquid inside a thin pasta parcel that bursts on the tongue, a piece of engineering that has anchored this kitchen for two decades. Beck, a German cooking modern Italian on the Cavalieri rooftop since 1994, took the third star in 2005 and has not dropped it since. The other reason to climb Monte Mario is the cellar: roughly 60,000 bottles, one of the deepest in Europe, with a Sassicaia vertical running back to 1968.
Anthony Genovese cooks Italian with French hands. Born in France to Calabrian parents, trained under Pierre Gagnaire, he opened Il Pagliaccio in 2003 with his sommelier wife Marion Lichtle, and spent two years cooking across Asia before that. The kitchen folds miso, dashi and Sichuan pepper into an eight-course tasting without announcing any of it: the seasoning travels but the plate still reads Roman. Thirty seats over two small floors, and Lichtle's list favours small Lazio and Piedmont growers most sommeliers skip. Two stars since 2014.
The technical move at Aroma is restraint at altitude. Giuseppe Di Iorio reworks Roman classics — oxtail ragù spooned over rigatoni instead of stewed vaccinara-style, artichokes alla giudia set against a Mediterranean turbot — and resists over-decorating a room that already has the Colosseum filling three-quarters of its south windows. He has cooked on the Palazzo Manfredi rooftop since 2013 and earned the star a year later. Forty seats on the terrace, the amphitheatre floodlit at night.
Thirty-eight years, one format, three brothers. Angelo Troiani cooks, Massimo runs the floor, Giuseppe pours, and the room has not been reinvented once since 1988. The test dish is the tagliolini with sea urchin: it comes up from the Pontine Islands south of Rome and lands the same morning, which is the only way that plate works. Behind an unmarked door on a vicolo off Piazza Navona sit three small linked rooms, about twenty-five covers. This is one-star Roman cooking with the theatre switched off.
Cristina Bowerman's signature is an inversion. She pulls cacio e pepe out of the sauce and laminates it into the pasta itself, so the ravioli carry the Pecorino and pepper and the shaved black truffle (December through March) sits on top. Trained in San Francisco and Austin, she opened Glass in Trastevere in 2004 — a glass-and-steel box on a medieval street, the neighbourhood's first star and still its only one. Bowerman remains the only female chef in Rome holding a Michelin star.
The format is the craft: thirty-five seats behind a meat-and-cheese vitrine, one seating a service, and a carbonara that fixed Rome's reputation for the dish. The guanciale is cured in-house for sixty days, the cheese is Pecorino di Fossa rather than Romano, the yolk runs high — it is the most-imitated carbonara in the city and the only one that earns the imitation. The Roscioli family ran the Giubbonari salumeria for thirty years before adding the counter in 2002; Alessandro's 2,800-label list and Nabil Hadj Hassen's kitchen (since 2011) do the rest. Book twelve weeks out for any Saturday.
The cacio e pepe is the exam, and Armando has passed it for sixty-five years. Pecorino Romano DOP from a single Lazio producer, tonnarelli rolled that morning, no cream and no butter — the emulsion comes from technique alone. Armando Gargioli opened the room beside the Pantheon in 1961; his grandson Claudio cooks the same menu in the same forty-eight-seat dining room today. Booking opens exactly thirty days out at midnight Rome time. Turn down the Pantheon-view window seat — that table is for tourists; the regulars eat in the back.
Twenty-eight seats, four pastas, no first-sitting reservations, cash preferred. Da Enzo opened on Via dei Vascellari in 1980 and has barely touched the menu since the late 1980s — the Roman quattro (carbonara, cacio e pepe, amatriciana, gricia), Wednesday gnocchi, fried artichokes October to April, Lazio wines under €30. The gricia is the dish: the guanciale is rendered until the pasta water emulsifies into a sauce the kitchen will not write down. The line forms at 18:45 for the 19:00 seating; show up later and you wait until 21:30 for the second turn.
How to Pick the Right Roman Restaurant for Your Evening
Three-star occasion (La Pergola) is its own category. A once-a-trip booking, jacket required, expect five hours. Two-star tasting (Il Pagliaccio) is for the long conversation. One-star (Aroma, Il Convivio, Glass) is the smart middle: fine cooking without the formality of the top floor. Trattorie (Roscioli, Armando, Da Enzo) are where Romans eat; price drops, volume rises, the food is more memorable than the room.
Trastevere has Glass and Da Enzo within a six-minute walk and is the dinner-and-walk-home neighbourhood. The Centro Storico (Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Campo de' Fiori) holds Armando, Roscioli, and Il Convivio. Pack them into one trip. Aroma is east, by the Colosseum. La Pergola sits on Monte Mario, twenty minutes by taxi from anywhere central; budget the time both ways.
Roscioli and La Pergola are the hardest in the city; both open at ninety days and prime weekend slots disappear the same morning. Armando opens at thirty days at midnight. Aroma and Il Pagliaccio take three to four weeks for Saturday. Glass and Il Convivio take same-week for weekday lunches. Da Enzo does not take first-sitting reservations at all. Queue or arrive at 21:15 for the second turn.
Roscioli is the most accommodating of the trattorie for gluten-free pasta (one substitution per booking, ordered ahead). Il Pagliaccio's tasting can be rebuilt vegetarian with 72 hours' notice. La Pergola will write a bespoke vegan menu but expects a full week's lead time and the same €310 price. Da Enzo will substitute exactly nothing; this is a Roman family kitchen, not a kitchen for accommodations.