Last visit: October 2026
My rating: 4/10
For your Instagram feed: 8/10
Price: €84.50 for two, no wine (October 2026)
Address: Via dei Vascellari 29, Rome (Trastevere)
Web: daenzoal29.com
Some restaurants are famous because the food is good, and some restaurants are famous because they’re famous. Da Enzo al 29, in Trastevere, in all likelihood belongs to the second category, and the fact that it has ended up at the top of more than one ranking of Rome’s best restaurants says a great deal about rankings, and something about us too.
The Queue, or the Liturgy
Da Enzo doesn’t take reservations. It might look like the quirk of a genuine old trattoria, but judging by the results it’s a stroke of marketing genius: at noon, when it opens, there’s already a queue in front of the door stretching down the alley like a Corpus Christi procession. The practical advice is to join the line around half past eleven. The queue you see in the photo isn’t random: it’s exactly the number of people who get a seat at the first sitting. If the line is longer than that when you arrive, get ready to spend an hour standing in the street, waiting for the lucky ones ahead of you to finish their lunch.
The queue is a ceremony, and the waiters officiate it with a showman’s flair: jokes, gestures, promises, and in the meantime they sell cocktails to the people waiting. A perfect business model: the customer pays for drinks to kill time while waiting for the chance to pay for food. Inside, on the walls, next to a vintage Coca-Cola sign, hang hoodies and caps with Enzo’s logo, like the merch stand of a band on tour. This is no longer a trattoria, it’s a brand with a kitchen attached.
The Warning Signs
A few clues already pointed to the worst. Above the door hangs a hand-painted wooden sign: “Tiramisù, take away, Aperol Spritz”. A Venetian dessert and a Venetian aperitif, displayed as if they were the house specialities, and in between them the most sinister words you can read over the door of a trattoria: take away. Tiramisù in Rome is a recurring obsession I’ve already complained about at Rimessa Roscioli, but this is another level. Watching tourists pair their oxtail stew with a spritz is a stab to the heart: it’s like watching someone order Lambrusco at an omakase in Tokyo.
Then the water arrives. Sparkling water costs three euros a litre and is, as the menu itself admits with a reference to Italian regulations, treated tap water with added carbon dioxide. Perfectly legal, mind you. But three euros for the municipal water supply with bubbles is the price charged by someone who knows you’ll come back anyway, or rather, that you’ll never come back, so it doesn’t matter.
Courgette Flower
It starts well, and I’m happy to say so. A courgette flower stuffed with provola and anchovies, in a fresh, light, crisp batter, with a gooey, savoury filling. For a few minutes I thought I’d been wrong about everything.
Rating: 7.5/10
Jewish-Style Artichoke
For a few minutes, precisely. The carciofo alla giudia, the deep-fried artichoke you’ll find in every Roman trattoria, arrives scorched and, above all, doesn’t taste of artichoke. It tastes of frying. In fairness: in October the Roman artichoke isn’t yet in season, and the menu itself says they use it “when in season”. Which raises the question: if it isn’t in season, why serve it?
Rating: 4/10
Gricia
This is where they can’t go wrong. Gricia is the simplest dish in Roman cooking: pasta, guanciale, pecorino, pepper. Four ingredients, nowhere to hide. And yet they go wrong. The menu promises artisan pasta, guanciale from Amatrice, PDO pecorino and freshly ground Sarawak pepper, a list worthy of a wine list. What arrives on the plate is pasta of modest texture swimming in liquid fat with a vaguely rancid aftertaste, characterless guanciale and flavours that never come together. No creaminess, no balance, nothing. A four, and that’s being generous, and it pains me, because in Rome gricia is an entrance exam, and Da Enzo fails it.
Rating: 4/10
Abbacchio alla Scottadito
And then it gets worse. The grilled lamb chops arrive charred: from the shape they could be lamb, from the taste, no. Stringy, dry meat that shreds like cardboard. The waiter comes by, attentive, to ask whether everything is all right, and we can’t hold back a few complaints. Very kindly, they bring us another portion, cooked this time without a flamethrower, but the result doesn’t change: the problem isn’t the cooking, it’s the raw material. I spent the rest of the meal missing the lamb I’d eaten the day before near the Pontormo exhibition, where there was no queue and no hand-painted sign.
Rating: 3.5/10
Enzo’s Tiramisù
The tiramisù does the rounds on every table, served in clear glasses with a ladyfinger poking out of the cream, and it’s the most photogenic thing in the place. It’s a trap: seven euros fifty for a small glass with modest contents and industrial flavours. The suspicion even comes with written evidence: the ingredients listed on the menu include raising agents, mustard, soy and a cocoa and hazelnut cream, things that don’t end up in a homemade tiramisù and that suggest ready-made ladyfingers and spreads instead. And, as always, there remains the question of why a Venetian dessert has become the official finale of every Roman trattoria.
Rating: 4/10
The Service
It must be said, and said loudly: the service is excellent. Friendly, fast, funny waiters, capable of managing a full dining room and a full street at the same time, and ready to replace a dish without any fuss. If the kitchen had half their talent, this would be a different review.
Rating: 9/10
Da Enzo al 29: Conclusion
Da Enzo al 29 is the perfect Trastevere trattoria experience, in the same sense that a theme park is the perfect experience of a medieval village. It’s all there: the cobbled alley, the checked tablecloths, the waiters with a quip ready, the queue that certifies you’re in the right place. Only the cooking is missing. Maybe it’s the marketing, maybe it’s Instagram, maybe it’s the irresistible appeal of waiting an hour for something other people waited for before you, but this place’s popularity is undeserved. There are surely trattorias in Rome where you eat far better, with no queue and free tap water. The problem is that they aren’t on Instagram, and maybe that’s exactly why they’re good.
