Naples is the best eating city in Italy and one of the cheapest. It is also disorganised, loud and completely uninterested in accommodating your schedule, which is part of the appeal and occasionally part of the problem.
The city's food culture is not a restaurant culture in the way that Florence or Milan's is. It runs on counters, hatches, bakeries and fry shops, on things eaten standing up in the street, and on a small number of dishes made obsessively well by places that have made only those dishes for four generations. Understanding that shape is more useful than a list of addresses, which is why this guide is organised around what to order and when rather than around a ranking.
Pizza, properly
Neapolitan pizza has a protected specification, and the rules are specific: soft wheat flour, a slow-fermented dough, a wood oven running above four hundred degrees, and sixty to ninety seconds of cooking. The result is a puffed, blistered, leopard-spotted rim around a centre that is soft and slightly wet.
If you are expecting a crisp base you have the wrong city. The middle of a Neapolitan pizza is not meant to support itself, which is why locals frequently fold it into quarters and eat it by hand, and why a knife and fork is entirely acceptable too. Nobody is watching.
Order marinara at least once. Tomato, garlic, oregano, olive oil, no cheese. It is the older of the two classics, it costs almost nothing, and without the mozzarella masking things it tells you far more about the dough and the tomatoes than a margherita does. Order the margherita as well, obviously.
Two further things worth knowing. The famous pizzerias in the centro storico have queues that run to an hour or more at peak times and operate on a numbered ticket system — take the ticket first, then decide whether to wait. And a neighbourhood pizzeria with no queue at all is frequently just as good, because the standard here is set by competition rather than by reputation. Walk two streets off the tourist route and try one.
Pizza fritta is the other version and the one visitors miss. The same dough, filled with ricotta, provola and pork cracklings, sealed and deep fried. It is sold from hatches for very little money and it is a meal.
The fried city
Naples fries more, and better, than anywhere else in Italy. The category is called *cuoppo* — a paper cone of fried things handed over a counter — and it is the correct lunch on a day when you are walking.
What goes in it varies by shop and by season, but the standards are courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta, salt cod, small fish, aubergine, panzarotti (potato croquettes flavoured with parsley and cheese) and arancini. A seafood cone and a vegetable cone are usually priced separately.
The related institution is *friggitoria*, the fry shop, which frequently occupies a doorway rather than a room. Eat standing up, use the paper, and do not go looking for a table.
Beyond the fryer
The dishes that define Neapolitan home cooking rarely make it onto tourist menus, which is a shame because they are the best argument for the city.
Pasta e patate — pasta and potato, cooked together until the starch from both thickens into something between a soup and a stew, often with a rind of provola melted through it. It is the most Neapolitan dish nobody outside the city orders, and it is astonishingly good for what it costs.
Genovese — a sauce of onions cooked down for many hours with a piece of beef until the onions collapse entirely into a sweet brown ragù. Nothing about it is Genoese; the name's origin is disputed and locals will offer you three explanations. Order it with ziti.
Ragù napoletano is not bolognese. It is large pieces of meat braised in tomato for the better part of a day, with the sauce served on pasta as a first course and the meat brought out afterwards. It is a Sunday dish and many restaurants only make it at weekends.
Spaghetti alle vongole and pasta e fagioli con le cozze — clams, and beans with mussels — are the coastal end of the same tradition.
Pastry, and when to eat it
Sfogliatella is the emblem: layered pastry folded into a ridged shell shape and filled with semolina and ricotta. It comes two ways. *Riccia* is the crisp, laminated, shell-shaped version; *frolla* is a soft shortcrust round with the same filling. Eat it warm, in the morning, standing at a bar, and accept that it will shatter down your front.
Babà is rum-soaked sponge, sold everywhere in the city and rarely bad. Pastiera, a wheat and ricotta tart scented with orange flower water, is an Easter cake that good pasticcerie now make year-round. Zeppole di San Giuseppe appear in March.
The neighbourhoods, and what each is like to eat in
The Centro Storico — the dense grid of the Greek and Roman street plan, around Spaccanapoli and Via dei Tribunali. This is where the famous pizzerias, the fry shops and the noise are. It eats cheapest and it is the most crowded.
La Pignasecca, just west, is the city's oldest street market and is where to go in the morning for fish, produce and the sort of unfussy trattoria that serves whatever was on the stall at six.
Vomero, reached by three separate funiculars, sits above the city and is residential, calmer and considerably cooler in summer. Prices are ordinary, the food is aimed at people who live there, and the view from Castel Sant'Elmo is the one you have seen.
Chiaia is the smart seafront district — better wine lists, higher prices, a more polished version of the same cooking.
Sanità, north of the centre, has changed a great deal in the last decade. It has the catacombs, a strong local food scene and a reputation among visitors that is now well out of date.
Timing and habits
Lunch runs from about one to three and dinner starts around eight, later at weekends. A restaurant that is open continuously through the afternoon is usually aimed at visitors.
Most places add a small per-person cover charge, which pays for bread and the table. Service is not generally added and tipping is modest — rounding up is normal, fifteen per cent is not expected.
House wine by the carafe is the default order and is usually local, cheap and perfectly good. If you want to trade up, the region's wines are Falanghina and Greco di Tufo in white and Aglianico in red.
Carry cash. Card acceptance has improved a great deal but the fry shops, the hatches and the older bakeries frequently do not take it, and those are the places you most want to buy from.
Making Naples the base
Naples is the best base for the whole region and is treated as a stopover by far too many people. Pompeii and Herculaneum are on the local railway. Vesuvius is a bus and a walk. Capri and Ischia are ferries from the port. And the entire Amalfi Coast is reachable without a car — the mechanics of that are in the Amalfi Coast without a car.
Two or three nights in the city itself is the right amount before moving on, and if you can arrange it, make one of them a Sunday, when the ragù comes out.
