Saveur

Photo: Sandro Michahelles

The café tradition in Trieste dates to the time of Maria Theresa, when Triestines began importing, roasting, and drinking coffee. They have never lost the habit, perhaps partly because illy—which is generally (and to my mind justly) considered the best espresso in Italy and therefore the world—is roasted here and only here. In their literary associations, the cafés rival those of Paris. James Joyce, who lived in Trieste for the better part of 14 years, finished Dubliners and started Ulysses in Trieste cafés. Rilke, Freud, and Italo Svevo also spent long hours at café tables.

The exquisite Pasticceria Caffè Pirona has a picture of a young James Joyce on one wall, looking tortured but natty in a straw boater and bow tie. It still sells Joyce's favorite confection, a horseshoe-shaped pastry called presnitz, full of walnuts, candied orange peel, and raisins. Caffè illy offers not only superb coffee and chic, minimalist decor by the London-based architect Claudio Silvestrin but also fine local wines and delicious small plates of food (pastas, ham smoked over cherrywood and sliced by hand, coffee-flavored bavarian cream). In the throbbing, more modern part of town stand a pair of local institutions. Tiled and spotless, Cremcaffè has a long chrome bar where up to 5,000 cups of coffee a day are served to clients standing two deep. In hot weather, people order tiny glasses of cold, unsweetened coffee, undiluted by ice cubes, with whipped cream on the side. Antico Caffè San Marco is the local showplace of art nouveau (called stile Liberty here); a richly paneled, L-shaped room with marble-topped tables, it is filled with chess players, newspaper readers, and weltschmerz.

For a taste of the past that won't provoke a lament for the present, Suban, a mainstay of Trieste restaurants since 1865, is the place to go. Suban serves delicious grilled meats and dessert crêpes (palacinke) straight from Vienna. But the don't-miss-it dish there is a definitive version of the city's favorite soup: jota, a burly amalgam of sauerkraut, pancetta, potatoes, beans, and cumin seeds. A real bora buster, that.

Trattoria Da Giovanni is one of those restaurants someone has to tell you about; there's no sign outside, and it's not in the guidebooks. (My wife, Betsey, and I found it through Manhattan restaurateur Lidia Bastianich, who was born in Istria, spent some of her girlhood in Trieste, and visits the city often.) But it is a great lunchtime favorite, a plain, decor-deprived little room, jam-packed with men in suits and little old ladies and utility workmen in fluorescent coveralls. Regional wines are served from the barrels behind the bar, including an exceptionally fruity, tangy tocai vaguely reminiscent of ginger ale. The food, cooked in a broom closet kitchen by two motherly sisters, is notably light but full flavored—pasta with a graceful tomato and calamari sauce, spicy and tasting vividly of the sea; herby polpettone, or meat loaf, so loose textured that only the chef's willpower seemed to be holding it together; and a near-weightless frittata with beans, broccoli, and carrots. I theorized that it must be a lot like what a good Trieste home cook would prepare, and the businessman at the next table said I was right.

There is plenty of good fish in Trieste itself, notably at Al Bragozzo and at Al Bagatto, which produces a knockout fritto misto, completely greaseless, featuring minuscule shrimp and squid. But you would make a mistake if you didn't head for Trattoria Risorta, in Muggia, a little town with a Venetian-style campanile, across an inlet from the city itself. Triestines say that the fish on their side of the Adriatic tastes better than the fish on the Venice side because the sea bottom near Trieste is rocky rather than sandy. I'm ready to believe it after spending a long evening at this unpretentious trattoria, sampling Dante Bertoldini's pure-tasting sea bass (branzino) with chanterelles and his rich shellfish ragout, which includes plump, firm crustaceans called gamberi. Seven inches long, they resemble langoustines. In the summertime, if you sit on the terrace by the sea, you'll be checked out by a multitude of envious neighborhood cats. No matter what the season, you will bask in the warm attention and profit from the expertise of Signor Bertoldini, a tall transplanted Venetian.

At Savron, a small tavern near the hillside hamlet of Opicina, on the Slovenian border, the kitchen led us back to the days of empire. Michele Labbate, the dapper owner, whose dining-room walls are hung with decorative plates and hunting trophies, plied us with beer from Villach, in Austria, and a menu listing dishes like thinly sliced veal with caper sauce, which shared a plate with a similarly thin slice of roast pork with anchovy sauce (a little too salty); bread dumplings (semmelknoedel) with goulash; boar sausages; roast pheasant; and gnocchi stuffed with apricots and served with cinnamon and brown butter (a little too sweet). A zucchini-and-ricotta-stuffed strudel made for a light and savory first course at lunch. I couldn't help wondering what a Florentine or a Neapolitan (or an Italian-American) would make of it.

Another day, we visited Devetak, a trattoria (or gostilna, in Slovenian) 20 miles north of Trieste near Savogna, on a country road not far from Slovenia. We arrived in a somber mood, having just passed the immense World War I ossuary at Redipuglia, where 100,000 Italian soldiers, killed in months of now largely forgotten fighting along the Isonzo River, are buried. But the Devetaks cheered us immediately with wines from Agostino Devetak's amazingly diverse cellar and the inspired cooking of his wife, Gabriella Cottali.

It was hard to imagine a more heartfelt hospitality: the trattoria was being redecorated, so the Devetaks gave us dinner at their own table. Gabriella, dark-eyed and dimpled, brought out homemade bread and honest, rustic food with tongue-gnarling names and crystalline flavors—frico (fritters made with montasio cheese), zlicniki (goat cheese with olive oil and nuts), mlinci (oven-dried handmade pasta, sauced with butter, herbs, and wild fennel), what she called "our old Sunday dish" (a juicy, meltingly tender shoulder of veal), and, for dessert, struccoletti (walnut strudels). "It's just home cooking," said Cottali. "Maybe you won't like it." She needn't have worried.

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #62