Al Vecchio Club Rosanero Restaurant: A Soccer Trattoria in Palermo
Before the trip to Palermo I went through a few menus online, and the prices caught me off guard: spaghetti in the center cost more than I'd expected to pay in southern Italy. In the end the reviews led me to a place named after neither a grandmother nor a home village, but after a soccer club.
Al Vecchio Club Rosanero is a small trattoria on Vicolo Caldomai, a side alley off via Maqueda in Palermo: soccer shirts and photos of players hang on the stone walls, and out of the kitchen comes Italian cuisine in portions that don't ask whether you can finish them. And it charges less for them than plenty of unremarkable restaurants a few streets away.
Who Owns the Name Rosanero
Rosanero, the pink and black, is a nickname every Italian reads instantly as Palermo's soccer club - newspaper headlines use it and it turns up in ordinary conversation. Pink and black were chosen in 1907 by club official Giuseppe Airoldi, who explained the choice in culinary terms: the colors point to the liqueurs of the Florio family - the bitter black one after a defeat, the sweet pink one to celebrate. There's also a legend that the colors came about by accident in a laundry, where the original red and blue shirts washed out to pink; it's only a story, but it's the one fans would rather tell. The club has a long-standing link with food and drink in the city - Bar Rosanero has stood by the botanical garden since 1961, and the players themselves used to drop in. I couldn't find out who named the trattoria, or when; reviews go back to at least 2012, and the word vecchio, old, is right there in its name.
Spaghetti, Half Portions and a Coperto for Small Change
The menu is short: about ten pasta dishes, nearly all of them on spaghetti, some ten meat and fish dishes on top of that, and a handful of antipasti and desserts. Almost everything can be ordered as a full or a half portion - except that the full portion is enormous and the half portion is what anyone else would call full. Mezza porzione is no Palermo invention: it's an old Italian tavern custom for diners who are short of money, and most restaurants have quietly dropped it. Here it lives on and saves the guest any embarrassment - a half portion is what a pub back home in Czechia would happily serve as a full one. The coperto, the charge for the table setting and the bread, comes to 1.50 EUR per person, a typical southern rate; in the touristy north of Italy it tends to be noticeably higher.
The kitchen sticks to the Sicilian repertoire. The caponata, sweet-and-sour eggplant with vegetables, was the best I've ever eaten. Spaghetti nero di seppia, spaghetti dyed with cuttlefish ink, are actually more a specialty of eastern Sicily and of the fishing ports from Catania up to Venice; Palermo has taken them on as its own, just as the whole island has. The home-grown classic is pasta con le sarde - spaghetti with sardines, wild fennel, raisins and pine nuts, the flavor signature of the city. And if you're after arancini, you'll find them a few minutes' walk away at the counter of Bar Touring or at Sfrigola; this is a place for sitting down, for a tablecloth and an hour and a half of your time.
Dinner Under the Shirts
Booking is a must here; we did ours in the morning, for dinner the same day. The waiter spoke almost no English - we asked in English, he kept answering in Italian with a smile, and we understood each other better than that sounds. What landed on the table was a plate of local antipasti for 6 EUR: vegetables pickled in vinegar, grilled eggplant with cheese, olives and local cheeses. Then caponata for 4 EUR, a full portion of spaghetti bolognese with a bowl of parmesan for 5 EUR, a half portion of spaghetti with cuttlefish ink and pieces of swordfish for 5 EUR, and a half portion of spaghetti with sardines and fennel, where the salty fish meets the aniseed note of wild fennel. For the whole feast for two, coperto and two waters included, we paid 29 EUR - huge portions for little money, in exactly that order of importance. There was no finishing it, and they boxed up the leftover pasta for us without batting an eye. If I had to pick a single restaurant in Palermo to come back to, I wouldn't have to think twice.
Al Vecchio Club Rosanero
