What Is Roman Food? A Guide to Cucina Romana

At 170 Grammi in Surry Hills, the menu is built around one city’s cooking — Rome. Not Italian food in the broad sense, not a tour of regional Italy, but specifically the food that developed in and around the capital over centuries: cucina romana. It’s a narrow brief, and that’s exactly the point.

Roman food doesn’t try to be everything. It’s built on a small number of ingredients used with precision, a handful of dishes refined to the point where nothing can be hidden, and a philosophy that treats simplicity not as a limitation but as a discipline. Here’s what that actually means.

What Is Cucina Romana?

Cucina romana is the traditional cooking of Rome and the surrounding Lazio region. Like most of the great regional Italian cuisines, it developed not from abundance but from constraint — the cooking of a city where the wealthy ate well and everyone else made the most of what was available, storable, and affordable.

That history produced a style defined by intense flavour from modest means. Where northern Italian cooking leans on butter, cream, and rich stocks, Roman cooking uses rendered fat, aged cheese, cured pork, and the starch of pasta water to build its depth. The results are satisfying in a particular way — direct, savoury, and completely without pretension.

What distinguishes cucina romana from the rest of Italy is as much about restraint as it is about specific ingredients. Roman cooks have historically used fewer components per dish, not more. The skill is in understanding how those components interact, and in not adding anything that doesn’t earn its place.

The Philosophy of Cucina Povera

Most of Rome’s iconic dishes come from cucina povera — literally “poor cooking,” or more accurately, cooking born from scarcity. The concept is common across southern and central Italy, but Rome developed its own particular expression of it.

The parts of the animal no one else wanted — cheeks, offal, trotters, tail — became the foundation of Roman meat cookery. The cheapest preserved ingredients — guanciale (cured pork cheek), aged Pecorino Romano, dried pasta — became the building blocks of its pasta tradition. And the volcanic plains of Campania, close enough to supply Rome with its tomatoes, gave the city one of the most distinctive pizza sauces in the world.

What cucina povera consistently proved is that constraint forces creativity, and creativity — applied over long enough — produces something that can’t be improved by adding more. A dish built on two or three ingredients, done well, is harder to make than a dish built on ten. Roman cooking understood that early and never stopped insisting on it.

The Four Classic Roman Pastas

Roman pasta is organised around four preparations, each built on a shared base of Pecorino Romano and black pepper, then differentiated by what’s added to them. Understanding the four is a good way into understanding Roman cooking as a whole — they show the same logic applied repeatedly, with deliberate variation.

Cacio e Pepe is the most stripped back: cheese and pepper, nothing else. No fat, no egg, no meat — the sauce is formed from the emulsification of Pecorino Romano with starchy pasta water, and the technical challenge of making it correctly is disproportionate to its simple ingredient list.

Gricia adds guanciale to the Cacio e Pepe base. The rendered fat from the cured pork cheek enriches the sauce and adds a savoury depth that the cheese and pepper alone can’t produce. Gricia is sometimes called the predecessor to both Carbonara and Amatriciana, because the additions that create those dishes are built on top of what Gricia already does.

Carbonara takes the Gricia foundation and adds free-range egg yolk, which emulsifies with the pasta water and the fat to create a sauce that’s richer and more complex than either Gricia or Cacio e Pepe. The yolk is added off the heat — too much temperature and it scrambles rather than emulsifies, which is the technical challenge that makes Carbonara harder to execute than it appears.

Amatriciana brings San Marzano tomato into the mix alongside guanciale and Pecorino Romano. The tomato’s acidity cuts through the fat of the pork and the salt of the cheese, creating a sauce with more contrast and brightness than the other three. It’s the only one of the four with tomato, and it sits in a different flavour register as a result — lighter and more vivid, where the others are rounder and richer.

The logic behind Cacio e Pepe and why the technique is more demanding than two ingredients suggest is worth understanding before you order — it changes what you look for when the dish arrives.

Roman Pizza — A Different Tradition

Roman pizza is distinct from Neapolitan, and the distinction matters. Where Neapolitan pizza is characterised by a thick, puffy, charred crust and a wet centre, Roman pizza tonda — the round, individually portioned style — is thin, crisp, and even across its surface. The base is the headline, not the edge.

That difference in style comes from a difference in dough. Roman pizza uses a high-hydration dough with a long cold fermentation — typically 48 to 72 hours — which develops a complex, slightly sour flavour and produces a base that crisps properly under woodfired heat without becoming hard or brittle. The result is light enough to eat a full pizza without feeling heavy, which is what makes it so well suited to a shared table.

The toppings follow the same Roman logic as the pasta: fewer components, better ingredients, nothing that doesn’t contribute. A Cacio e Pepe pizza is two things. A Burrata pizza is four or five, each one specific and load-bearing. The full story of what separates Roman pizza from the rest goes deeper into why the base is as important as what goes on it.

The Ingredients That Define Roman Cooking

Roman food is only as good as the ingredients it starts with. Because the dishes are built on so few components, there’s nowhere for a mediocre ingredient to hide — which is why Roman cooking has a particular relationship with sourcing, provenance, and protection.

Guanciale — cured pork cheek — is the fat of Roman cooking. It’s richer and more deeply flavoured than pancetta, and it behaves differently under heat, rendering into a glossy, intensely savoury fat that coats pasta and glazes pizza bases. Substituting pancetta is possible, but the dish changes character in a way that’s hard to ignore once you know what guanciale actually tastes like.

Pecorino Romano is the cheese. Sharp, salty, and aged from sheep’s milk, it’s the seasoning and the structure of most Roman pasta sauces simultaneously. Parmesan is a common substitute elsewhere, but the two cheeses are different enough that swapping one for the other produces a noticeably different result — Parmesan is milder and less salty; Pecorino is more aggressive and does more of the work alone.

San Marzano tomatoes are the base of every red sauce. Grown in the volcanic soils of Campania, they’re less acidic and more flavourful than most canned tomatoes, which means a good Roman pizza sauce can be made with almost no addition — just crushed tomato, lightly seasoned, applied in a thin layer. Many of these ingredients carry DOP certification, which defines not just what they are but where and how they must be produced.

Roman Food at 170 Grammi

The menu at 170 Grammi is built entirely around this tradition. The pasta dishes are the four canonical Roman preparations. The pizzas are Roman tonda, made on a long-fermented base. The ingredients — guanciale, Pecorino Romano, San Marzano, La Stella burrata, Levoni Prosciutto San Daniele — are sourced for the same reason Roman cooking has always sourced carefully: when the dish has nowhere to hide, the ingredient has to be right.

That consistency of approach is what makes 170 Grammi function as a single menu rather than a list of options. Every dish belongs to the same tradition, uses the same logic, and either reinforces or contrasts with what’s around it at the table. The full range is on the dine-in menu, where the connection between the Roman pasta and pizza traditions becomes clear when you read them alongside each other.

👉 Book a table at 170 Grammi and work your way through cucina romana — start with the Cacio e Pepe to understand the base, then build from there.