Rachel Roddy’s chicken braised in citrus and herbs. Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian. View image in fullscreen Rachel Roddy’s chicken braised in citrus and herbs. Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian. A kitchen in Rome Italian food and drink Rachel Roddy’s recipe for chicken with citrus and oregano This dish of chicken in a lipsmacking citrus and oregano sauce has been handed down through many generations of Roman restaurateurs
Rachel Roddy Thu 22 Oct 2026 07.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I f you look through the window of Piatto Romano between 10am and midday, there will almost certainly be two, maybe three people at the round table trimming vegetables: chicory, artichokes, poppy greens, amaranth. After midday, the crates and trimmings will have been cleared away and the table will now be home to trays of bright-green boiled vegetables and, maybe, baked salt cod. By 12.30pm, everything will have been moved into the small kitchen in time for service, which starts at 12.45pm.
When I first moved to Rome in 2005, Via Bodoni 62 was home to a restaurant called Da Rafaelle, which had white plastic chairs (inside as well) and served traditional Roman food with plenty of offal. We went to Da Rafaelle a few times before it closed in 2009. But, mostly, we went to La Torricella, which is on the other side of Testaccio and serves mainly fish. The owner is Augusto D’Alfonsi and, during lunch one day, he mentioned that he was taking over via Bodoni 62, and that his daughter Francesca would run it. They’d serve traditional Roman food with plenty of offal and it would be called Piatto Romano. This was 2011. My son was born later that year and my memories are not unpleasantly foggy; of the vegetable trolley in the corner, of chicken with red peppers and of Francesca and her father negotiating strongly. I also remember Francesca’s brother, Andrea, starting to be around more, before he eventually took over in late 2013.
Andrea grew up riding his bike along the pavement in front of La Torricella, which his parents had opened in 1973, a few years before he was born. If his lunch didn’t come out of the kitchen at La Torricella, it probably came out of the kitchen at Da Antonio on Via dei Pastini, where Andrea’s maternal grandma cooked, or from the kitchen of his maternal grandfather’s restaurant, Da Giovanni on Via dei Barbieri. As a teenager, Andrea also ate at his paternal grandfather’s osteria, Gran Sasso in Trastevere, and in the various branches of Insalata Ricca , a chain of salad restaurants opened by his entrepreneurial uncle Gino in the 1980s. All the various parts of the family have Abruzzese roots, but Andrea mentions Gino, eccentric and single-minded about history, vegetables and nutrition, as being a particular influence.
The way Andrea continues to evolve Piatto Romano (which for many is the embodiment of an ideal Roman trattoria) would require several columns. For now, though, I will note his singlemindedness about the vegetables he picks up every day from his various sources. The other night, we had courgette greens – a little hairy and very succulent – with Leprino rabbit (typical of the Tuscia area of Viterbo) braised in wine and citrus, which produces a lipsmacking sauce/gravy. And head chef Umberto Mussato, who has worked with Andrea since 2021, has adapted his recipe for this column, but using chicken instead of rabbit. The dish is made even more tasty by the addition of three to five anchovy fillets mashed with a…