Where to Eat in Naples: Everywhere I Actually Ate (and a Few I Wish I Had)

I ate constantly for four days in Naples and somehow still didn’t get through everywhere on my list, worth bearing in mind if you’re working with a similarly tight 3 days in Naples itinerary.

I’ve written about pizza separately in my 5 best pizzerias in Naples guide, so this post covers everything else, seafood, pasta, gelato and drinks.

1. Il Re Dei Mari – Pescheria

I ordered from here for dinner one night, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

A seafood takeaway right by the market, where the fish counter and the fryer are the same business.

That paper cone you’ll see everywhere in Naples has a name, and it’s a cuoppo.

It goes back to the 1800s, when the city’s poorest bought the small unsold pieces at the fish market at the end of the day, battered them, fried them and ate them standing in the street.

There was even an understanding between the traders and the families buying from them, who could pay for the food a little at a time as long as it was settled within eight days.

The journalist Matilde Serao wrote about the whole ritual in 1884.

So when you order one, you’re eating something the city invented to feed people who couldn’t afford to eat.

One thing worth knowing before you get yours: never fold the top of the cone closed.

It traps the steam and turns a perfectly crisp fry soggy in about a minute.

And if the paper is already soaked through with oil when they hand it to you, the fryer wasn’t hot enough. Walk on.

🍽️ What I ordered: A mixed fried seafood box with prawns, calamari and the catch of the day, plus gnocchi with mixed seafood.

💰 What I paid: €12 for the fried seafood box and €9 for the gnocchi.

I’d rate the fried seafood box an 8 out of 10.

It was so fresh and everything was cooked to perfection. Make sure you squeeze it with the slice of lemon they give you too.

It makes the dish 1000x better.

Properly traditional Neapolitan seaside food, and about as close to the original version of this as you’ll get.

2. 120 Grammi Spaghetti Takeaway

This one came recommended, and I didn’t get there myself.

But it’s worth knowing about if you want pasta on the go rather than a sit-down meal, which is surprisingly hard to find in Naples.

Small takeaway portions of the classics: carbonara, amatriciana and cacio e pepe.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about that menu. All three of those are Roman, not Neapolitan.

Carbonara is guanciale, egg, pecorino and pepper, and there is no cream in it anywhere.

So if you’ve been eating your way through pizza and cuoppo all week, this is a bit of a detour from the local food rather than more of it.

They use Armando pasta, which is bronze-die extruded.

That means the surface comes out rough and porous instead of glassy, so the sauce actually clings to it rather than sliding to the bottom of the box.

Which matters more than usual when you’re eating out of a container standing up.

Apparently the crispy guanciale in the carbonara is the standout.

This is a great light lunch to pick up in between visiting attractions in Naples.

3. I Buongustai

My accommodation host sent me here, and a host recommendation is usually the one worth taking.

I didn’t make it myself, but this was his pick for the best food in the area, and he’s the one I stayed with at the place I’d book again in Naples.

It’s a proper old-school trattoria and pizzeria.

The lasagne is the standout, but the dish I’d actually order is the pasta e patate.

That one is worth explaining, because on paper it sounds mad.

It’s pasta and potatoes in the same bowl, which is two carbohydrates doing the same job.

Naples invented it in the 1600s, once potatoes arrived from the Americas and landed in a city where dried pasta was already cheap and everywhere.

Two things nobody could afford to waste, cooked into one pot that would actually fill you up after a day’s work.

The written recipe first turns up in 1773, in a Neapolitan cookbook called Cuoco Galante.

The details are the good part.

The pasta is traditionally pasta mista, the leftover odds and ends of different shapes from the bottom of the packet, which is why every mouthful is a slightly different size.

The potatoes break down as they cook and thicken the whole thing, so it comes out somewhere between a soup and a pasta.

And it’s flavoured with the rind of the parmesan, the bit most people throw away.

Order the version with provola and you get smoked cheese cubes stirred through at the end, going stringy in the heat.

If you’re staying nearby and want a local’s pick rather than mine, this is the one.

4. A scarpetta

This is the #1 pasta place I went to on my trip!

We had spaghetti al pomodoro, which is about as simple as a plate of food gets.

Tomatoes, pasta, oil, basil. That’s it.

Our guide on the food tour I did in Naples explained why it tasted like that, and the answer is the tomatoes.

They were San Marzano, grown in the plain that sits between Naples and Salerno in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.

That soil is volcanic, built up over thousands of years by eruptions from the same mountain that buried Pompeii.

All that volcanic activity left the ground loaded with potassium and minerals, and it’s why the tomatoes there come out sweet and low in acid instead of sharp.

They’re also thicker-walled with fewer seeds than a normal plum tomato, so there’s less water in them and the sauce doesn’t go thin.

Which is the whole reason a sauce like this works.

There’s nothing else on the plate to hide behind.

Get the tomatoes wrong and you’ve got spaghetti in watery red liquid, and most restaurants outside this region are quietly adding sugar to compensate for a tomato that can’t do it on its own.

Although the spaghetti is simple, the flavours were out of this WORLD.

5. Here’s a test you can use anywhere in Italy, and it takes about two seconds from outside the shop.

Look at the tubs.

If the gelato is piled up in tall fluffy mounds above the rim, walk away.

Real gelato physically cannot hold that shape at serving temperature.

The only way to make it stand up like that is to whip it full of air and add stabilisers, so those pretty peaks are a confession rather than a display.

Then look at the colours.

Real pistachio is a dull brownish green, not neon. Real banana is a greyish off white, not yellow. Real mint is white.

Anything that looks like it belongs in a sweet shop was coloured artificially.

The best places often hide the gelato completely, under flat metal lids called pozzetti, because keeping it covered protects it from air and temperature swings. You can’t see a thing, and that’s the point.

This gelateria on Piazza Trieste e Trento has been open more than 40 years, and it’s genuinely one of the better gelato stops I’ve had in Italy.

🍽️ What I ordered: Melon gelato, refreshing enough that I’d order it again immediately given the chance.

It’s the same flavour that won me over on my day trip down to the Amalfi Coast.

6. Aperol Spritz to go, and Cammarota Spritz

Drinking in the street is completely normal here, and once you notice it you’ll see it everywhere.

Grabbing a spritz to go and just walking with it is one of the easiest wins in this city.

Mine cost €1.50 from a place near the entrance to Napoli Sotterranea.

For context on how good that price is, a normal sized spritz in most bars around there runs about €2.50, and you’d pay four or five times that in Rome or Florence.

If you want to do it properly, the name everyone will tell you is Cammarota Spritz, tucked into the Quartieri Spagnoli on Vico Lungo Teatro Nuovo.

It’s tiny, and most of the crowd ends up standing in the narrow street outside, which is the whole appeal.

Spritz for around €1, served in a plastic cup, with students and locals packed in from late afternoon until close.

Two things worth knowing before you go, because neither is obvious.

Ask for a spritz piccolo, or say the one euro spritz. They do several sizes, and if you don’t specify you’ll be handed a bigger, pricier one by default.

And bring cash, because that’s all they take.

They’re known especially for the pink spritz and the limoncello spritz.

7. Gino Sorbillo Vomero

This is the pizza that properly welcomed me to Naples.

I ordered it the night I landed, after a long haul from Albania via Greece, with almost no energy left in me.

My first choice, Pizza Maria Mia, never turned up. After an hour and a half of waiting I cancelled it and gave up.

My accommodation pointed me toward Gino Sorbillo Vomero instead, and I ordered through Glovo, which I learned is the app locals actually use rather than Deliveroo.

🍽️ What I ordered: A Margherita and a fried pizza, since I’d heard the fried version was a proper Neapolitan speciality.

It is, and there’s a reason for it.

Pizza fritta took off after the Second World War, when the city’s wood ovens had been destroyed or there was no fuel to run them, but frying oil could still be got hold of.

So the pizza went into the pan instead. It stayed on the menu long after the ovens came back, and Sophia Loren selling it from a street stall in a 1954 film turned it into an icon.

You’re eating a workaround that outlived the problem.

I ate it straight out of the box, still warm, sitting on the sofa in my room, and it might genuinely be the best pizza I’ve ever eaten in my life!

Given how wrecked I was that night, that’s saying something.

It’s properly affordable too, which only made that first bite feel even better after the day I’d had.

It also made my list of the best pizza in Naples.

8. Vincenzo Capasso

A tiny pizzeria tucked away on a street my accommodation host swore a few famous names have eaten on.

I went early afternoon so it was completely dead, all soft light and cute little interior.

I’m told it gets properly packed once evening hits, and how much depends on when you come, which I get into in my guide to when to visit Naples.

🍽️ What I ordered: A capricciosa pizza, an espresso, 1 water and a Coke Zero.

💰 What I paid: €18 all up, and the staff threw in an espresso for free, no reason given.

Here’s the thing about a free coffee in Naples.

This city invented caffè sospeso, the suspended coffee.

It started in the working class bars here around the turn of the last century. You order one coffee and pay for two, and the second one hangs there, unclaimed, for whoever comes in later and can’t afford one. They ask if there’s a sospeso going, and they get it, no explanation required and no one watching them take it.

It boomed during the war and it’s still running today, and it’s since spread to Berlin, London and Buenos Aires.

Coffee given away for no reason isn’t a novelty here. It’s a two hundred year old habit.

So an espresso appearing on the table with no explanation was a small thing, but it wasn’t a random thing.

And it’s part of why I left this city feeling nothing like the warnings I’d been given before I came. One more small data point for my longer answer on whether Naples is safe.

9. Café Moreno

Not every stop in Naples has to be a slice.

This one was a quick pastry and coffee, and the pastry was a sfogliatella.

I had it with an espresso and it’s SOOO good!

Here’s what you’re actually holding.

The sfogliatella isn’t Neapolitan at all, at least not originally. It was invented around the 1600s by a nun in the cloistered convent of Santa Rosa, up on the Amalfi Coast, who had leftover semolina cooked in milk and didn’t want to waste it.

She mixed it with ricotta, dried fruit and lemon liqueur, wrapped it in pastry, and shaped the whole thing like a monk’s hood.

The recipe stayed locked inside that convent for roughly two hundred years.

Then in 1818 a Neapolitan innkeeper called Pasquale Pintauro got hold of it, thinned the pastry right out, dropped a few of the fussier bits and reshaped it into the shell you see today.

He turned his tavern on Via Toledo into a shop selling nothing else. His pastry shop is still there.

One thing worth knowing before you order, because you’ll get asked.

There are two versions. Riccia is the ruffled one, shatteringly crisp, made of paper-thin layers, and it’s the one people picture.

Frolla is the smooth shortcrust version, softer and less messy, same filling inside.

Neither is more authentic. Pick whichever sounds better, and know that riccia will go everywhere down your front.

The espresso there was great too!

Naples takes its coffee seriously, so expect a fast, strong shot standing at the counter rather than a lingering sit-down.

What I’d try next time

Four days wasn’t enough in Naples, I admit.

I never made it to any of the sea view restaurants near Posillipo or Castel dell’Ovo that locals kept mentioning, so if you have more time than I did, that’s where I’d start.

There’s something quite nice about that being the thing I missed.

Posillipo takes its name from the Greek Pausilypon, which means respite from worry, or the place where pain stops. The Greeks named that stretch of coast for exactly that reason, and wealthy Romans built their villas along it a century before Christ for the same one.

Two thousand years later it’s still where people go to eat slowly and look at the water.

That’s the version of Naples I didn’t get to, and it’s a large part of why I’d go back.

For every dish I tried and genuinely loved, there’s a full run-through in my post on the food I ate in Naples.