Maybe we’re getting old. But there’s also a good deal of boredom in all this reasoning. Avocado has never convinced us, like pastel shades, designed bars, gourmet pizza and press offices. It may be that life often seems like a big marketing operation, that we spent too much time thinking about how to detach ourselves from a past that showed us as the louts and cheerfuls in the eyes of the world, it may be that from the civilization of briscola and tressette in the trattoria we have become consumers of goji and Instagram stories. Which we forget shortly after. From the quatrains of wine to the oz of Bubble Tea, from the linen tablecloths to the dishes that look like De Chirico’s paintings, when someone decided to change our connotations at the table maybe we were watching Barbara D’Urso on Canale 5.

A people of saints, poets, navigators, but above all of enjoyment, first at the table than in bed. At least once. In a Milan dominated by super food and rice bowls, the true side of food is dulled by the standardization of tastes and needs. Those trattorias that we want to rediscover not only as a hymn to the slow time which we like so much, but as an overbearing declaration of belonging to a religion made of quarters and half liters of wine and ancestral recipes.

In the name of the first, the second, the side dish and the holy spirit. In these trattorias, orders placed on notepads, cotton tablecloths, baskets of rosettes placed in the middle of the table, and the paranances are often filthy. No superstar chef, here in the kitchen there is the chef who often serves also at the table, who does the accounts and manages the restaurant for generations. You eat like at home, sometimes worse, sometimes better for those who are not too familiar.

Three requirements: historicity, in the sense of age; working well at lunch, in the sense of feeding the working class (many of the selected restaurants are even closed for dinner); having reasonable prices, do not spend more than 30 € per head for dinner, while at lunch you are about 10 € all inclusive. Among saffron risottos, baked shin, gnocchi with zola and ignorant boiled meats in green sauce, in these restaurants you rediscover the desire to stay at the table without too many frills.

The last of the romantics are here.

Translated by Sila Turku Askin