Genny street food: Frittatina and Fried Naples in Sorrento
I bring one addiction with me to Italy. It's called frittatina, I fell for it on my first visit to Naples at a place called Di Matteo, and ever since I've been scanning every corner in the south for it. But Sorrento sits 47 kilometers from my trusted source, so I had to look for a local stand-in.
Genny street food is a bistro serving fried Neapolitan specialties on Sorrento's Via degli Aranci, right by the Circumvesuviana station - a small place with a rating plenty of Italian restaurants with tablecloths would envy. This is where I went to find out whether fried Naples survives the trip across the bay to Sorrento.
What a Frittatina Is and Why It Never Left Campania
First, let me correct myself: for years I called the frittatina a fried ball. The classic frittatina is a flat disc of bucatini bound with thick béchamel, with ham, peas and cheese, coated in batter and breadcrumbs and deep-fried until golden. The mixture is left to set first, and only then are the discs cut out of it - and the double coating is the whole secret: it holds together a center meant to stay creamy, almost runny, while the outside crunches. There is also a "red" version with Neapolitan ragù and spin-offs with other cheeses, but the principle stays the same: pasta that passes itself off as fast food you eat with your hands, while taking more work than plenty of Sunday lunches.
The frittatina comes from home cooking. In Neapolitan families, the pasta left over from lunch gets covered with beaten egg and fried in a pan - the resulting frittata di maccheroni is food of the poor neighborhoods, of school snacks and day trips, and any Czech kitchen with leftover Sunday pasta knows the same instinct. The frittatina is its younger, professional cousin from the fry shop: smaller, no eggs, but with béchamel and a deep fryer. The whole line starts with the maccheronari, the street vendors who boiled pasta in big cauldrons in 19th-century Naples and served it with nothing but cheese and pepper, straight into your hand. The frittatina has barely spread beyond Campania: Rome relies on rice supplì, Sicily on arancini - frying pasta occurred to nobody but Naples.
The Bar Set by Di Matteo, the Window at Genny's
My addiction has a specific address: Antica Pizzeria Di Matteo at Via dei Tribunali 94, frying and baking in Naples since 1936. In July 1994, in the middle of the G7 summit, Bill Clinton stopped by and ate a pizza folded "wallet style" out on the street, washed down with a Coke. Which is a little unfair: the president made the pizza famous, but the lines outside today are at least as much about the frittatina, which they make famously creamy. The bar I measure everyone else against is set right here.
Genny street food plays in a lower league and a good way further south, but the repertoire is unmistakably Neapolitan: frittatine including a carbonara version, arancini, crocché, montanare. Genny is the Neapolitan nickname for Gennaro - Gennaro and Rosa are the ones at the window, and the reviews all say the same thing: the fried pieces are crisp and dry, not greasy. In Sorrento, a town of lemons, limoncello and gnocchi alla sorrentina, fried street food is an openly admitted import from Naples - which makes it matter all the more who works the fryer. Eat the frittatina hot, right there at the window - once the center cools, that cream sets into a stodgy lump.
Fried Naples on a Single Tray
At Genny's we picked out a few pieces from across the counter and had a nice chat at the window with the friendly, talkative staff. The frittatina crunched and wasn't greasy, and the center pulled away in long strands where I'd bitten in; the other pieces were built on the same combination of crisp coating and soft interior. The whole tray easily fills two people, and we paid 12 EUR for it. And the verdict? Di Matteo remains unbeaten - it set the bar very, very high. But on Via degli Aranci they get respectably close to it.
Genny street food
