Most guides to Apulian food are lists of twenty dishes, and by the third day of a holiday you have forgotten nineteen of them. This is not that. These are the things that, eaten properly once, explain everything else you will be offered here.
It is also a guide to how to order, which matters more than what to order, and to the handful of things worth being suspicious of.
First, the logic behind all of it
Apulian cooking is cucina povera, the cooking of people who did not have much. The phrase is used as a compliment now, and it is worth remembering that it did not begin as one.
In practice it means that almost every classic dish is built from three or four inexpensive things handled extremely well: wheat, vegetables, olive oil, and whatever the sea gave up that morning. Meat is an occasion rather than a habit. Butter is nearly absent, cream almost entirely. Flavour has to come out of the ingredient, because there is nothing else in the pan to hide behind.
Two consequences follow, and they shape the whole experience of eating here.
The first is that quality depends almost entirely on the raw material, which is why everyone talks about where things come from. It is not a fashion imported from somewhere else. It is the method.
The second is that the food is seasonal in a way that is not negotiable. A dish made from four ingredients cannot be carried by technique when one of them is out of season, and the difference between the right month and the wrong one is the difference between a revelation and a shrug.
The dishes that explain the region
Orecchiette with cime di rapa
The one dish Puglia would keep if it could only keep one. Small ear-shaped pasta, bitter turnip tops, garlic, chilli, olive oil, and an anchovy melted in until it has vanished into the sauce.
It is a winter dish, roughly November to March. The tops are sweet after the cold and coarse before it. A version served in August with broccoli standing in for the real thing is a dish for people the kitchen does not expect to see again.
Eat it and pay attention to the bitterness, because that is the flavour this region is built on and the one most visitors have to learn. Sweetness is not the goal here. Balance is.
Fave e cicoria
Dried broad beans cooked down to a soft yellow purée, served beside wild chicory that has been boiled and dressed in oil. Nothing else on the plate.
Order it even though the description sounds like nothing. It is the most Apulian thing on any menu: the sweetness of the beans against the bitterness of the greens, with the oil poured over at the end doing a great deal of the work. This is the dish where you find out whether a kitchen buys good oil, because there is nowhere for bad oil to hide.
It is also, incidentally, vegan, ancient and cheap, which is a combination that turns up constantly in this cuisine without anyone having planned it.
Bread, and focaccia barese
Bread is a serious matter here. The famous loaf comes from Altamura, made with durum semolina, with a thick dark crust, a yellow crumb and a shelf life measured in days rather than hours. It was given a protected designation long before that was fashionable, and it is worth buying a whole loaf even for two people.
Then there is focaccia barese: soft, heavy, deeply oiled, with cherry tomatoes crushed into the surface and whole olives pressed in. Sold by weight in bakeries, eaten standing up from the paper, and better at eleven in the morning than at any other hour of the day.
Buy it where there is a queue of people who are clearly not tourists. This rule is almost infallible and takes no expertise to apply.
Raw seafood, on the coast
On the Adriatic side you will be offered raw sea urchins, raw prawns, raw anchovies dressed in nothing but lemon, and sometimes a raw octopus dish that takes nerve the first time. Take all of it, provided you are somewhere that sells fish rather than somewhere that sells lunch.
This is the category where being careful pays most. Good raw fish here is exceptional and inexpensive; indifferent raw fish is neither, and the difference between them is a matter of hours rather than of skill. The test is simple: does the place have a fish counter, and does the menu change?
Burrata, in the right place
Eat it, but eat it where it was made that morning. Burrata is at its best within hours and dull after two days, and the version that has crossed a border is a different food.
Cold from the fridge it tastes of very little. Ask for it at room temperature, have it cut open at the table, use good oil and a pinch of salt, and leave it otherwise alone.
Vegetables that are not a side dish
Aubergine, peppers, artichokes, fennel, and a long list of wild greens whose names change from one town to the next. In Puglia these are frequently the meal rather than the accompaniment, and a table where everything is vegetables is completely ordinary.
Two to look for. Lampascioni, small wild bulbs, bitter, usually served under oil: an acquired taste worth acquiring. And parmigiana, which here is often lighter than the Neapolitan version and sometimes made with courgette instead of aubergine.
The meat, when there is meat
Inland, where the sea stops being the obvious answer, the tradition is grilled and slow-cooked. Bombette, small rolls of pork wrapped around cheese and grilled over wood, come from the Valle d'Itria and are the thing to eat in Cisternino or Martina Franca. Capocollo from Martina Franca is among the best cured meats in the south.
The Sunday ragù, cooked for hours with a rolled piece of beef or horse, is a household dish more than a restaurant one. If you are ever offered it at someone's table, cancel whatever came next.
Sweet things
Apulian pastry runs to almonds, honey, ricotta and fried dough. Pasticciotto, a small shortcrust case filled with custard, belongs to the Salento and is eaten warm for breakfast. Almond paste and almond milk are everywhere in summer. Cartellate, fried ribbons of dough soaked in cooked wine must, appear at Christmas and at almost no other time.
And the granita and brioche habit in summer, borrowed from Sicily but thoroughly adopted, which is breakfast as far as anyone here is concerned.
How to order, which matters more than what
The shape of a meal
A full Apulian meal has more courses than most visitors expect and much smaller portions than they fear. Antipasti can be a parade of eight or ten small plates and are frequently the best part. Then a first course of pasta, then a second of meat or fish with vegetables ordered separately, then something sweet.
You are not obliged to do all of it. Two courses is normal and nobody will mind. What is worth doing at least once is the full antipasto sequence at a place that does it properly, because it is the clearest picture of what the region grows and cures.
Reading a menu
- Short is good. A menu of fifteen dishes means a kitchen cooking what it has. A menu of sixty means a freezer.
- Handwritten or changing is better still. Especially near the coast, where the catch decides.
- Ask what came in today rather than what is good. The answer to the second question is always the same; the answer to the first is information.
- Dialect names are a good sign, and the waiter will happily explain them. Nobody here minds the question.
Timing
Lunch runs from roughly one to three, dinner from eight-thirty onwards, later in summer. A restaurant that is empty at seven is not a bad restaurant, it is simply seven. Book for Sunday lunch, which is the busiest meal of the week by a distance and the one where families fill the room.
Two things to be suspicious of
Anything described as tipico on a laminated menu with photographs, in the street with the most foot traffic in town. And any pasta dish with cream in it, which is not an Apulian invention and generally signals a kitchen that has decided its customers will not be back.
Neither is a disaster. Both are a waste of one of the limited number of meals you get to eat here.
What to bring home
Oil, from a mill rather than a supermarket, with the harvest year on the label. Dried orecchiette, which cost almost nothing and are better than what you can buy abroad. Taralli, the small crisp bread rings that go with everything. Capers under salt. Almonds. Ricotta salata or caciocavallo, both of which travel where burrata does not.
Wine, if you have room: primitivo and negroamaro are the famous reds, but the whites and rosés are the local everyday drink and are consistently underpriced.
The shortest way in
Eat where the menu is short and changes. Ask what came in this morning. Order the bitter thing and the vegetable thing at least once each, even when the instinct says otherwise.
And if you want to understand why a plate of pasta and greens can be the best food you eat all year, spend a morning making it. The logic of this cooking becomes obvious about ten minutes into doing it with your own hands, and no amount of reading achieves the same thing.