Five in the afternoon. Noemí, an impeccable woman in her seventies, is sitting at a table, eating croissants with a knife and fork. She takes her own thermal glass from hers where -in Bar Roma they already know- they serve her tea. When she finishes, she concentrates on doing crossword puzzles. Noemí’s ritual has been repeated every afternoon since her husband died. He doesn’t remember exactly how many years ago, but he does remember that Jesús and Laudino, the owners since 1952, were behind the bar.
Fortunately, when they bought Roma in 2019, the new owners -the same ones from La Fuerzas- took great pains to preserve not only the appearance but also the spirit of this bar in the Abasto neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
Other Noemíes go, families from the neighborhood who share a pizza, single men who eat a whole pizza, young people who leave the theaters in the area to drink vermouth; an environment that is very much ours that is a balm for so much modernity.
In Rome, pizza from Buenos Aires is made in the mold, a product ignored by the local gastronomy, always behind the trends. The dough is made from agroecological flour, cold fermented for 48 hours, cooked from scratch at the moment. High quality cheeses, tomatoes, olive oil, seasonal vegetables and other ingredients are used. There are the usual ones: the muzza, the canchera, and the fugazetta, with purple, white and green onions, a true upgrade to the classic one. From Monday to Thursday, there is stuffed fugazetta.
The creative deployment occurs in the specials. A favorite is Amor de Invierno (pine mushrooms, mushrooms, capers and smoked cheese), a play, El Gol de Diego a Italia, obviously spicy, with spinach and basil pesto, cuartirolo cheese, mozzarella, among other ingredients; and a reversion, the Gran Porteña, inspired by the classic ham and bell peppers, but with smoked pork loin and roasted bell peppers.
Wood-fired chicken empanadas have their fan club and one is already being founded for the homemade matambre sandwich on pizza bread, a legacy of old Rome. To drink, house vermouth.
