just VASGO: Restaurant Review: La Gatta Mangiona

La Gatta Mangiona, meaning the overstuffed female cat, is a fantastic neighborhood restaurant outside the hustle and bustle of central Rome.

It is, possibly, a purveyor of the BEST PIZZA IN ROME. See photo below for proof.

Photo courtesy of Claybrook Digital Enterprises, LLP

This restaurant's walls are loaded with pictures of those darned, cute furballs. Luckily for us consumers, no cats are seen in the dining rooms. They are also not likely to show their whiskered, gremlin-like faces in the kitchens.

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I am writing about this restaurant because it's worth writing about. This came highly recommended from other fellow Rome bloggers after I'd done my careful research for the best pizza in Rome. Though it's hard to pinpoint which place in the Eternal City deserves the top honor, it's rather easy to tell if a place should be considered one of the best. And this place earns its spot.

Between the suppli (imagine risotto shaped into a ball, then deep fried), the pizza, all made with fresh, high quality ingredients, and one of the best lemon desserts I've ever tasted (the flavor reminded me of lemon cake batter), the food is worth the slightly longer trek away from the center of the city! I shouldn't forget to mention their Italian craft beer selection is quite good.

La Gatta Mangiona is farther out of the city than most care to go to. It's located right near the square called Piazza di San Giovanni di Dio. It's on the west side of the Tiber River, south of the neighborhood called Trastevere, south of the Janiculum Hill, located in a beautiful and increasingly popular-to-the-foodies area called Monte Verde Vecchio. To get there, your best bet is to take the 8 Tram from the slightly centrally located Largo Argentina, an interesting area where Julius Caesar was supposedly stabbed by Brutus. It's not a terrible walking distance from the Pantheon in one direction, the huge monument that looks like a Greek temple built to honor Vittorio Emmanuele II in Piazza Venezia, and Campo Dei Fiori, another. Best to just copy and paste these names into google maps if you are unfamiliar with what I'm talking about.

Anyway, you take the 8 tram twelve (12) stops if my count is correct, to the stop called S. Giovanni di Dio and the restaurant is down a side street very much nearby.

What a fantastic restaurant! Tracking their daily specials used to be the beat of a hungry detective: the only option being to hoof it to the restaurant and see what they had that day. With the advent of the wonderful tool called the Internet, savvy aficionados of technology can download the La Gatta Mangiona app, updated every day they change their daily specials. It's in Italian though, so be prepared to translate lots of food items. Or you can always go to their website, http://www.lagattamangiona.com/.

Daily specials are always recommended. If what they offer doesn't sound good, I can attest to their suppli beinng excellent. The plain suppli (with marinara sauce and a nugget of mozzarella) is good. Even better is their asparagus and saffron variety. My favorite was a special seafood one that had squid ink sauce around the rice and of course chunks of seafood in the middle. Outstanding! Their other antipasti might be good, same as their primi piatti, but I could never stomach more than that and the huge personal pizza that follows.

Photo courtesy of Claybrook Digital Enterprises, LLP

Pizza recommendations? The ones with potato on it - in Italian, it's called patate. Those are my favorites. They have only a few that include the buttery starch, and they are all delicious. Of course, you can't go wrong with the Margharita Semplice, a standard to compare all the other pizzerias you try. And really, I haven't found a variety I haven't enjoyed.