Piatto Romano exists because several Roman restaurant families kept having children who paid attention. Andrea D'Alfonsi grew up cycling the pavement outside his parents' fish trattoria La Torricella, eating lunch from his maternal grandmother's kitchen at Da Antonio and his maternal grandfather's at Da Giovanni, and later from his paternal grandfather's osteria Gran Sasso in Trastevere. This is not a chef who did a stage in Copenhagen. This is a chef who absorbed a tradition by osmosis across four distinct kitchens before he was old enough to vote. The dish Rachel Roddy introduces here — chicken braised in fresh citrus juice, finished with anchovy mashed in red-wine vinegar — comes from Piatto Romano's head chef Umberto Mussato, adapted from a rabbit dish that uses Leprino rabbit braised in wine and citrus with a lipsmacking sauce. The adaptation is sensible: rabbit has the right texture and acidity-tolerance for this treatment but is genuinely hard to source outside Italy, and chicken thighs with skin and bone behave well under long, wet heat. The technique is Roman in the specific sense that it doesn't fuss. Brown the chicken in batches so you don't steam it. Add wine, let it evaporate. Add citrus — and the instruction here is serious: 400ml of fresh juice from a mix of orange, lemon, grapefruit, mandarin, not a bottle of Tropicana. Cover and forget about it for 45 minutes, then uncover and reduce for 20 more. The result is a sauce that's simultaneously bright and sticky, citrus acid mellowed by rendered chicken fat. The anchovy-and-vinegar finish is the move that elevates this from braised chicken to something with genuine depth. Three to five anchovy fillets mashed with a tablespoon of good red-wine vinegar, stirred in at the end and rested for 30 minutes before serving. The anchovies don't make it taste fishy — they dissolve into the sauce and provide umami ballast, the same reason you'd add a splash of Worcestershire to a stew. The 30-minute rest is not optional; it's what lets the sauce tighten and the flavors marry. Roddy herself has been writing about Roman food from inside Rome since 2005, which is the only position from which this kind of piece can be written honestly. She doesn't romanticize Piatto Romano; she observes it — the vegetable trimming at the round table between 10am and midday, the cleared crates by 12.30pm, the service at 12.45pm. This is a working trattoria running a tightly managed daily rhythm, not a lifestyle brand. The recipe arrives as a natural consequence of that observation, not as a brand collaboration. For the home cook, the only real decision is the citrus blend. The recipe specifies a mix — orange for sweetness, lemon for sharpness, grapefruit for bitterness, mandarin for floral notes — and using all four produces a more complex sauce than any single juice alone. Squeezing 400ml by hand takes about 10 minutes and is worth it. Everything else about this recipe is genuinely low-effort for the result it produces.
