Mazzo, the small and the brave

On April 27th 2013, Mazzo opened in an unknown street with a misleadingly romantic name in Centocelle, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Rome that cannot boast any famous intellectual regulars nor great historical events. Its dining room doesn’t spread over more than 15 square metres and only has a table for 10, where people eat next to one another, even strangers, with a few shelves with second-hand products on sale, the menu written in chalk on the blackboard-walls and t the kitchen-workshop partly in view.

This is the real heart of the Fooders’ – aka Francesca Barreca and Marco Baccanelli – restaurant. Their project was born in 2006, with the idea of blending their passions – food, graphics, music – in a sort of itinerating live cooking, and today they still alternate strictly-speaking cuisine with the creation of – never banal, sometimes irreverent – events and with communication services, always linked to the food sector. With them, there’s Pietro Clemente, also known as Il Turco or Sparo Manero, a rapper at work in the kitchen. However, this is not the nth case of “creative people in times of recession” who decide to work with food: Marco and Francesca are real cooks, they have studied, worked and sweated in the kitchen and one only needs to taste their offer to understand that there’s little blabber.

Almost one year after the opening, their Mazzo (an ironic name that in Roman slang refers to all the efforts they made to get to the opening) has become a point of reference for those who want to eat well. Full stop. The dining room, just like the kitchen, focuses on substance: it's all about food - is their motto. There are few dishes but very well made, small prices proportionate to the restaurant’s dimensions (and a choice of wines and craft beers). Though it is true that it doesn’t take much to fill up a restaurant holding 10 people – plus two by the counter – here people come (and return) to taste truly interesting dishes, that set themselves apart both from stale Roman tradition and gastronomic trends too, while playing with glocal ingredients and inspirations assembled through travels and ethnic acquaintances.

So here come the Pork belly with 5 spices or the Sheep “alla cottora”, or the Anchovy in tempura with curry with mashed chickpeas with thyme or the Tagliolini with a meat sauce made with chicken entrails (and no tomato), not to mention the delightful chocolate Mississippi Mud Pie. Easy, you might say: few seats, few problems, few costs. This is not exactly the case. It took the Fooders two years to get to open this restaurant, despite it being so tiny, what with bureaucracy, unclear relations with local institutions, problems with the renovation firm and other stressful factors, Francesca explains.

A true jungle through which sometimes one can only get out thanks to the help of friends and family, a sort of game in which, as soon as you complete a level, you need to face yet another, with even greater difficulties. So if creativity, enthusiasm and the desire to do something different do not succumb in the face of difficulties that, when small, it’s even harder to overcome, we ask Francesca what helps them to get up in the morning with the desire to go ahead and work this hard (in Roman slang, farsi un mazzo tanto). «The same things that made us start – she replies – a vital cuisine, beautiful raw materials, the infinite possibilities of learning that derives from a boundless universe of recipes, traditions, techniques and ingredients. You never get bored».

Mazzo
Via delle Rose, 54
Roma
+39.06.64962847
On Sundays, open at lunch too, reservations are recommended