Street Food in Naples (Family Post)

 

On our first day in Naples, we met a guide at 6pm for a walking tour. This time it was different than the regular walking tours though because it was all about food. We weren’t sure what to expect but assumed pizza might be included. In this post, everyone will add a little bit of what they found memorable about the evening.



Cora said: We went on a Food Tour in Naples. The first thing we tried was Tripe. Tripe is cow intestines and the mouth and tongue. Everyone looked at it and couldn’t believe we were going to have to eat it. We were thinking “What did we get ourselves into?!” because it was the first stop on our food tour.



Zavi said: I don’t know how people can eat that stuff. You can see the whiskers and hair. It was with lemon which would just make it sour. Pretty much it tasted like sour, chewy stuff that’s really disgusting. It’s probably healthy though. I’m glad he didn’t bring out brains. 



Next we got all the fried stuff, like doughnuts, pasta, rice, and zucchini flowers. The fried doughnuts weren’t sweet, they were salty and very oily but I liked them. 

    

Chelsea said: Next we tried a typical biscuit that people usually eat when they have wine or beer. It was quite plain tasting with a tiny hint of chilli. The toasted almonds were the best part and were really crunchy. 

    

Zorion said: The fried pizza was next. It tasted very nice. We thought it would be something you could find in the United States because they fry a lot of foods but we’ve never seen it before. It was actually easier to eat than normal pizza because all the sauce and cheese stayed inside like a calzone. The guide told us that it’s not as good if it isn’t freshly made. 



Later when we were exploring on our own, we got another fried pizza and saw how it was made. The fried pizza was Zavian’s favourite food, even better than the sweets. You can see a video above.



Zavian said: Last in the tour, we got the sweets and coffee (but we didn’t drink the coffee because it was late at night). They had these little cup/mushroom shaped things that were really soft which are called Babá. They are really popular everywhere. They also had a really flaky pastry which had lots of different fillings inside. 



Zaf said: My favourite part of the food tour was getting to meet local food sellers. For example, Antonio from the cake shop who had lived in Sydney for 6 years and he loved Bondi beach and playing volleyball on the sand. He couldn’t quite remember the word for “volleyball” but he said “ball, tennis, sand” and we figured it out. I also got to meet the two brothers, Emilio and Lino, who owned the fried pizza shop. They had a big sign with caricature drawings of themselves on the front entrance. It was cool that you could see them cooking the pizza and they looked exactly liked their own drawings. Finally, I enjoyed hearing the personal stories and challenges of the tour guide Savatori. It was moving to hear how he was showing courage and strength to overcome the recent loss of his wife and 11 year old daughter last year in a car crash. He was doing this tour guide job as a way to connect with people, not to be alone and help heal his loss. He also loved everything about Batman and knew the names of every Batman actor since the beginning of Gotham.



Chelsea said: In the end, we were very glad we went on this tour because we probably wouldn’t have tried all the foods if we weren’t introduced to them by our guide. We ended up trying all the iconic Napoli foods, some just the once and others we got more than once. A few other memorable foods from our four days in Naples were:



Freshly made cannolis 



Ice drinks called “granita” were sold on nearly every street with different fruit flavours



Wallet pizza from the “oldest pizzeria in the world” (the sign said 1738!)