Best Italian Restaurants in Rome 2026

Rome below, three stars above — Italy's finest hotel restaurant, and the most spectacular view you will eat under.

La Pergola at the Rome Cavalieri Waldorf Astoria holds three Michelin stars — the only restaurant in Rome with that distinction — and occupies the top floor of the hotel on Monte Mario, the highest point in the city, with a terrace that reveals Rome in its entirety: the dome of St Peter's, the Colosseum, the Tiber's meander through the ancient city. Chef Heinz Beck has been at the kitchen's helm since 1994, and the room was redesigned in 2024 by Parisian studio Jouin Manku with warm ochres and travertine textures that bring Rome's materiality inside without making the dining room feel like a museum.

Beck's menu operates on the principle of circular cuisine — every element of each dish is used completely, seasonal ingredients drive the calendar, and the flavours are recognisably Italian without replicating any single regional tradition. The Fagottelli "La Pergola" is the signature: small pasta parcels filled with a carbonara sauce of egg yolks, pecorino, and whipped cream, finished with white wine and veal stock, served in a pool of reduction that concentrates the Roman flavour tradition into a single extraordinary bite. The ten-course tasting menu (€350) progresses through a seasonal vegetable preparation, a fish course of extraordinary delicacy, a pasta, and a meat course of sourced Chianina or Marchigiana beef before arriving at the dessert sequence — typically three courses built around Italian seasonal fruit and artisanal cheese.

For a birthday in Rome that must be remembered, La Pergola is the answer without qualification. The staff coordinate milestone celebrations with professional discretion: a personalised menu card, a birthday dessert prepared separately from the tasting menu, and the private terrace available on request for after-dinner drinks with the city spread below. Book four to six weeks ahead for any evening; summer months require three months minimum.

Two stars in the Centro Storico — the most intimate fine dining room in Rome, where Anthony Genovese's food rewards absolute attention.

Il Pagliaccio occupies a narrow historic building in Rome's Centro Storico, its dining room holding just 35 covers across two intimate floors of pale walls, candlelight, and the kind of near-silence that only happens in a room where everyone is paying complete attention to what is in front of them. Chef Anthony Genovese — born in Italy, trained in Japan and France, returned to Rome — holds two Michelin stars and presents a cuisine that draws on all three traditions without losing its Italian centre of gravity. The result is one of Rome's most distinctive tasting menus.

Genovese's signature preparation has changed over the years as his technique has deepened, but the current form of his risotto — Carnaroli rice from a single producer in Vercelli, cooked in a fish stock made from locally caught pagello rosso, finished with bottarga di muggine from Sardinia and a cold-pressed Ligurian olive oil that arrives tableside in a small flask — is one of Rome's great dishes. The squid ink tagliolini, made in-house and dressed with a raw sea urchin sauce and a single piece of grilled langoustine, demonstrates the influence of his Japanese training in its precision of temperature and texture contrast. Dessert — typically a gelato made with Italian heritage dairy paired with a fermented fruit preparation — arrives as a cooling conclusion to a meal of considerable intensity.

For a proposal in Rome's historic centre, Il Pagliaccio provides the most private setting of any Michelin-starred restaurant: the small room, the candlelight, and the attentive service create an environment where a significant question does not feel performed. The staff are experienced with milestone evenings and manage them without theatrics.

The Colosseum is forty metres away — Aroma's rooftop terrace is the most dramatically located table in Italy.

Aroma sits on the rooftop terrace of Hotel Palazzo Manfredi, a boutique hotel in the Celio hill district, and its defining characteristic is the view: from the corner table, the Colosseum rises at eye level forty metres away, illuminated at night in amber light that turns the ancient stones into something that looks like a painting of the ancient stones. Chef Giuseppe Di Iorio holds one Michelin star and has built a menu of creative Italian cooking around the understanding that no one at this terrace is here primarily for the food. He makes that competitive disadvantage disappear by cooking considerably better than the view demands.

Di Iorio's carbonara, made with guanciale rendered to a crackling crisp in a separate pan from the egg and pecorino sauce, reassembled at service temperature rather than cooked together, is the definitive modern version of Rome's most argued-about dish. The seasonal pasta changes with the market: in spring, chitarrine with fresh morchella mushrooms, spring garlic, and a white truffle oil from Umbria; in autumn, pappardelle with a wild boar ragù from the Castelli Romani hills south of the city. The tasting menu closes with a trolley of Italian artisanal cheeses — Piedmontese Castelmagno, Sicilian Vastedda, aged Parmigiano Reggiano from the 36-month reserve — selected personally by the sommelier each week.

Aroma is, categorically, the best proposal location in Rome and likely in all of Italy. The private corner table on the far end of the terrace, positioned to maximise the Colosseum view, can be reserved on request and held for a milestone moment. The sommelier's Champagne selection is handled with the seriousness that the occasion requires.

Rome's most serious business dinner table — the Troiani brothers have run this kitchen since 1990, and the cellar is extraordinary.

Il Convivio Troiani operates from a 16th-century palazzo in the historic centre, its dining room a sequence of low-vaulted rooms with exposed stone walls, dark timber, and candlelight that gives the space the feeling of a private club that has operated for centuries without announcing its presence. Brothers Angelo, Giuseppe, and Massimo Troiani have run this kitchen together since 1990, holding one Michelin star and developing an author's cuisine that treats Roman and central Italian tradition as a starting point rather than a destination. The wine cellar — over 5,000 labels including vertical selections of Sassicaia, Barolo from Giacomo Conterno, and rare Burgundy — is one of the finest in any Roman restaurant.

The kitchen's signature approach applies French-informed technique to strictly Italian ingredients: porcini mushroom risotto made with Carnaroli from a named farm in Lombardy, finished with a sauce of roasted porcini liquid and a single shaving of black truffle from Norcia; oxtail braised in the Roman tradition — tomato, celery, bitter chocolate, pine nuts — but reconstructed as a pressed terrine and served with a celery root purée. The pasta is made daily: tonnarelli cacio e pepe with a precision that the Troiani family has refined across 35 years of service to a clientele that would know immediately if it deviated.

For business dinners in Rome — meetings where the guest is a significant client, a potential partner, or a decision-maker who will be paying attention to the detail of the choice — Il Convivio Troiani signals everything that matters: restraint, history, quality, and a wine programme that will produce conversation rather than end it.

Half deli, half restaurant — Roscioli has never needed to choose, and the carbonara it makes from this ambiguity is Rome's finest.

Roscioli is a salumeria — a traditional Italian deli — that has been operating on Via dei Giubbonari near Campo de' Fiori since 1972, selling bread baked in-house, imported Italian and French cheeses, cured meats from producers the Roscioli family has worked with for decades, and natural wines from a cellar that functions simultaneously as the restaurant's wine list. In 2002 the family added a restaurant at the back of the deli: wooden tables, wine bottles stacked floor-to-ceiling, and a kitchen producing Roman pasta classics with the same rigour that the deli applies to its product selection. The combination is unique in Rome and possibly in the world.

The carbonara at Roscioli is the dish most replicated and least successfully imitated in Rome: guanciale from a specific producer in the Castelli Romani hills, rendered slowly with no added fat until the fat has become its own sauce; Pecorino Romano DOP and Parmigiano Reggiano in a 60/40 ratio, combined with egg yolk and whole egg; spaghetti cooked to a rigidity that holds the sauce without releasing water. The assembly happens off the heat, using the pasta's residual warmth to create a creaminess that no cream has touched. The amatriciana — tomato, guanciale, pecorino, and the restraint to add nothing else — is its equal. The burrata from Puglia, delivered Tuesday and Friday, sells out by 2pm.

For a first date or a solo evening, Roscioli provides the most genuine Roman experience available at this level: the food is profound, the setting is authentically historic without performing authenticity, and the natural wine list gives any table a reason to stay longer than planned.

Trastevere's most honest trattoria — the cacio e pepe has not changed since 1935, because it never needed to.

Da Enzo al 29 has occupied the same corner of Trastevere since 1935 — a trattoria of ten tables, exposed brick walls, framed football photographs, and a menu that has not sought innovation because the four Roman pasta classics it executes are each at their finest expression already. The neighbourhood around it has changed dramatically; the restaurant's relationship to its cooking has not. This is the place Romans take visitors when they want to show what Roman food actually means, and the queue outside on weekend evenings — this is one of the very few significant Roman restaurants that does not take reservations — is composed largely of Romans.

The coda alla vaccinara — oxtail braised for four hours in tomato, celery, raisins, pine nuts, and bitter chocolate in the traditional Roman manner — is the Sunday dish and the most important thing on the menu: ancient, generous, and impossible to make adequately in a hurry. The trippa alla romana, cooked in tomato sauce with mint and pecorino, serves as both a test of the kitchen's honesty and a gateway to understanding the cucina povera philosophy that produced Rome's great dishes. The cacio e pepe uses only toasted black pepper and Pecorino Romano, executed in the traditional blending method — no cream, no butter, no compromise.

Da Enzo al 29 operates on the logic that the right birthday dinner is not always the most expensive one. For a group of four to six who want to experience the Rome that Michelin guides cannot fully capture, this is the essential address in the city.