Street Food, the Soul of Naples

Five years among the vicoli taught me this: Caserta had the home cooking, but Naples was the mecca. The smell, the noise, the people eating standing up — even if all I ever bought was a pizza a portafoglio.

Neapolitan street food — pizza a portafoglio, pizza fritta and a cuoppo of fried seafood on a wooden table in a Naples alley

I spent five years in the vicoli of Naples, studying at college, and before that we went often to visit my father, who commuted there every day. So I knew the city in the two ways that matter: as a routine and as an event. And in both versions, the street fed you. Caserta — home — had the awesome home-cooked tradition this blog is mostly about. Naples was something else: the mecca of street food, a city where the cooking spills out of the kitchens and into your hands.

I should be honest, because this blog is honest: I am an eat-at-home kind of person, and I was an eat-at-home kind of student. Walking those alleys between classes I rarely bought anything other than a pizza a portafoglio — but I smelled everything. The fry shops, the cuoppo stalls, the sugar of the pasticcerie, the sellers calling. You did not need to buy the street food of Naples to be fed by it. It was the air of the city. The smell, the people around you eating and selling a hundred different things — that was the soul of the place, and you breathed it on the way to class.

Naples isn't just a city. It is a flavor you carry with you — even if, like me, you mostly carried it folded in quarters, wrapped in paper.

What did we actually order, growing up in southern Italy, when we ate out at all? Pizza — the portafoglio standing up, or a proper pizza on a plate sitting down. And gelato, of course. Sunday pastries carried home in the tray, the cornetto for breakfast. That short list is most of eating out in our world; everything else happened at my mother's table. But the street had its own canon, and it deserves its own section of this blog.

The canon, roughly: the pizza a portafoglio, folded like a wallet, the one I actually bought. The pizza fritta and the montanara — never my personal favourites, but two institutions of the city. The cuoppo, the paper cone — di terra with crocchè, zeppoline and sciurilli, or di mare, full of fried fish. The frittatina di pasta — iconic, though I confess it never conquered me. The cuzzetiello, the hollowed bread end filled with ragù. The taralli 'nzogna e pepe. The ancient ones: 'o broro 'e purpo, the octopus broth, and 'o pere e 'o musso, which I am still not sure I ever dared to try.

And the sweet end of the street: the sfogliatella — riccia or frolla, we eat both, to pay respect — and the babà, which in our family stopped being street food entirely: my father loved it so much that my mother used to make one large babà as the cake for his birthday. I think what he liked most was the rum.

The street rule Eat it hot and fresh, standing up, walking. Keep some cash handy. Don't be afraid to try something new — and follow the locals, because they know best. The infographic below maps the whole canon.

Street Food, the Soul of Naples — infographic, Mediterranean Notes by Giuseppe Astarita

Tap to enlarge — the street food canon of Naples

Each of the great street dishes is getting its own page in this section — the pizza a portafoglio first, because it was mine. The rest of the canon follows, written with the honesty of someone who mostly watched and smelled: that counts as eating in Naples too.

Mangia, cammina, e innamorati di Napoli.