In Rome, it’s love. Our review of Giuseppe Di Iorio’s starred restaurant

From the amberjack in veils, marinated in rose, with chicory and raspberry, to the tagliolini with clams with candied lemon, wild garlic and smoked ash. Here are the dishes that made us fall in love with Aroma

It’s not every day you get to have lunch on a terrace in front of the Colosseum. And it almost never happens that you eat so well, pampered by the flavors of recipes that have captivated the palates of royalty, presidents and actors, from George Bush to Angelina Jolie and Tom Cruise. But it would be really reductive to talk about Aroma, the restaurant that is the subject of today’s review, for the details related to the impressive clientele or the overwhelming panorama, because here the real protagonist is the food: refined, elegant but explosive at the same time. Dishes inspired by Mediterranean aromas but made with great creativity. Becauseyou come to Aroma to taste the dishes of a great starred chef, for no other reason. We come to Aroma to experience pleasure.

Let’s start with the details: we are in Rome and we are probably telling you about one of the best restaurants in the city. Perched on the terrace of the Palazzo Manfredi hotel, a five-star hotel belonging to the Manfredi Fine Hotels Collection group, Aroma is the restaurant led by chef Giuseppe Di Iorio, one Michelin star . The resident chef is Fabio Sangiovanni, the clientele is mostly international, the waiting list is three months to get a table.

Now that the details are known, let’s try to entice readers. In the research we have been conducting for some time on the best restaurants in Rome, focusing in particular on new openings, this time we chose to come for lunch in a place that already represents a certainty for some years. Aroma welcomed us on one of those heart-opening days in mid-April. And we chose the “Ionic” menu, based on fish, to combine the heat of the sun with the flavors of the sea. A decision that immediately proved to be the right one. Lunch began with four sensational tastings, what in starred restaurants are called Amuse-bouche: very delicatezeppoline carrots and courgettes, a tomato basket with aubergine and buffalo stew, a husbandzzino with ricotta and caviar called “Asse Roma Napoli” and a rosemary flatbread with sea urchin and fish roe which made us smell and taste the sea, as it had happened very few times. Four small dishes that already made us understand one thing: the chef’s attention to the chosen products, all of great quality and flavour.

This was followed by a flan of porcini mushrooms with green apple, leek and leek and black pepper crumble. But it was the subsequent dishes that caused us a taste disturbance: by combination, by contrast, by flavour. In fact, an exciting and refined Amberjack in veils, marinated in rose, with chicory and raspberry (opening photo), a joy for the eyes, and a very powerful tagliolini with clams with candied lemon, wild garlic and smoked ash. The best pasta dish with clams I’ve ever tasted before.

To be able to create dishes of this intensity and this type of combination “it takes a lot of thought, a lot of technique but above all high quality raw materials” Di Iorio himself confirmed to Dire – My cuisine aims to be linear and recognisable, with great raw materials: vegetables that must taste of the field, fish that must taste of the sea and meat that must taste of meat and not of intensive farming. The truth is that we can’t invent anything anymore and that the product itself makes the difference. I don’t like globalized cuisine: our food and wine culture is the envy of the world, both in terms of raw materials and how they are treated. So at Aroma we started from this, from Mediterranean cuisine and from the valorisation of Made in Italy, its sea and its land. In this way it is possible to create large dishes that convey sensations, like a tagliolini with clams which I like can be eaten while imagining having your feet in the sea water“.

And the lunch, in fact, continued from the sea, with a request from outside the menu, which however the Di Iorio staff gladly accepted: the Glacier cod 51 with white sesame butter, mixed salad and dried tomato , one of the chef’s most iconic dishes. Otherwise we could have tried the grilled turbot with its foam and snow peas. Then there is space for small pastries and desserts with a very interesting “Green apple explosion, with a green apple and lime sorbet”, a mandarin sorbet, pican nut wafer and orange and walnut essence, and a chocolate soufflé with sauce English and chocolate wafer.

There is no doubt that Aroma represented one of the best culinary experiences we had in Rome. And this is probably what the famous faces who came and returned here several times to eat here also thought: Angelina Jolie, Woody Allen, Morgan Freeman, Matthew Mc Conaughey, Spike Lee, Richard Gere, Tom Cruise and then presidents like George Bush or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, footballers, singers. It was also confessed to us that Queen Elizabeth, during a visit to Rome, ordered some takeaway dishes made by chef Di Iorio. The former British sovereign, however, missed out on a great view by giving up a visit in person, a panorama that ranges from the Colosseum in the foreground, to the dome of St. Peter’s in the distance, up to the nearest Ludus Magnus, or the little known remains of a small Roman amphitheater that served as a gym for the gladiators who, shortly thereafter, would have trod the arena of the Flavian Amphitheatre.