Puglia food guide

Food in Puglia is just about universally beautiful, even though this is largely true for any Italian region.

Puglia is blessed with some of the best raw materials that make up the cuisine: mozzarella and the whole category of fresh cheeses known as latticini, seafood from the heavenly blue waters that doesn’t have to travel far into town, olives that produce some particularly nice oil, pomegranates that are squeezed for fresh juice at cafes, almonds that make their way into pastries, desserts, drinks, and more.

Puglia’s bread – pane pugliese, is some of the best in Italy (having been given DOP status), made with semolina in addition to wheat flour which makes it soft and flavorful.

All of these ingredients are big stars in pugliese dishes, and in these you’ll see a love for the products and the territory reflected in the dishes’ simplicity – when the ingredients are this good, the recipe doesn’t need to be complicated to create a delicious meal.

If you can get inland rather than staying on the coast the whole time, you’ll be able to discover some of the most traditional Pugliese dishes away from a more likely crowd (at least in the summer). Eat your way through the region by venturing to these spots for the best versions of these foods.

Orecchiette: Osteria da Giuseppe (Ceglie Messapica, Brindisi)

Orecchiette are well known outside of Italy – the little ear-shaped pasta lines countless shelves even in most everyday grocery stores – but nothing can prepare you for how wonderful it tastes in its homeland of Puglia.

The simple flour-and-water dough is made with durum wheat, as is common throughout the south of Italy (egg-enriched pasta dough was historically more common in the wealthier north and central parts of the peninsula). Fresh orecchiette in Puglia offer a satisfying chewy texture and roomier concave spaces for holding sauce and vegetables.

You might see the classic al pomodoro treatment topped with ricotta salata cheese (more common locally than Parmigiano), or more frequently orecchiette alle cime di rapa, with turnip greens (similar to broccoli rabe), garlic, hot pepper flakes, and anchovies – but notably without the sausage that is often added in Italian-American contexts. The charming, quintessentially Pugliese town of Ceglie Messapica (inland between Ostuni and Brindisi) is home to Osteria da Giuseppe, a lovely family-owned restaurant with some of the best fresh orecchiette around.

Fave e Cicoria: Terranima (Bari)

Fava bean season in Italy, and in Puglia, is blissfully longer than in many other places; it starts as early as March and you might well see the cheerful pale green beans even in June. The most common preparation of them in Puglia is fave e cicoria, a purée of fava beans that is topped with sauteed chicory – a crunchy green vegetable that is popular throughout Italy (cicoria refers to its leaves, but its base is where Romans get puntarelle from).

This might be the perfect pairing – the slightly sweet, creamy fava purée balances the slight bitterness of the greens, while the greens add a nice element of texture when you scoop up some of the fave with bread. It’s delicious – and filling, so make sure you save room for Puglia’s abundant other antipasti, not to mention your main course!

Go to Terranima in Bari, a restaurant that focuses on traditional recipes (and sourcing ingredients sourcing according to Slow Food principles) and but with a slightly more contemporary vibe. But remember, you can only get fave e cicoria from early spring to June!

Ciceri e Tria: Trattoria Nonna Tretti (Lecce)

The pasta known as ciceri (or ceci) e tria is another example of Puglia’s naturally plant-based cooking, which takes up a large part of the cuisine even in a region that loves seafood and dairy; the vegetables in Puglia are considered some of Italy’s best.

This pasta is comforting and rich thanks to chickpeas that are cooked until they’re soft enough to puree into a “sauce” seasoned with onions, which then coats the local pasta known as tria: hand-cut ribbons of flour-and-water pasta, like simpler and more irregular tagliatelle. Some of the ribbons of tria are fried into crispy, golden puffs to top the fresh pasta just before serving, which makes this one of the most fun and surprising pastas in the country.

Trattoria Nonna Tretti in Lecce makes a perfect ciceri e tria for your first time with the dish – it’s especially good on a chilly or at least not hot day, as this is proper steaming-hot comfort food. It’s also one of the rare opportunities in Italy to spice up your food yourself – the trattoria keeps bottles of chili-infused oil on hand, which adds a welcome kick to the pasta’s flavor.

Caffè Pugliese/Leccese: Caffè Alvino (Lecce)

News flash: you can, in fact, get iced coffee in Italy. It may not be a tall, larger-than-latte milky one, but the caffè leccese – sometimes referred to as caffè pugliese more generally – is a delicious, addicting, even more refreshing version that, like all Italian coffee, packs a punch for its size. It tops a single shot of espresso with sciroppo di mandorla, Puglia’s special almond-milky syrup – which is left for you to stir in yourself. Local knowledge instructs to stir it only until halfway blended with the coffee, so that you can enjoy a bit of a separate parfait-like “layer” of syrup.

It’s certainly even more special than plain old caffè con ghiaccio – espresso over ice – which you can order in a typical coffee bar in the summer without the barista batting an eyelid. Puglia’s abundance of almond trees makes the mandorla the region’s most ubiquitous nut, from pastries to desserts to even, thankfully, coffee. In Lecce, the historic Caffè Alvino in the central Piazza Sant’Oranzo is the perfect place to start your day with the local drink – but you’ll be tempted to linger for hours over all of the pastries.

Pasticciotto: Pasticceria Ascolane (Galatina)

The pasticiotto is Puglia’s favorite breakfast sweet: an oval-shaped pastry of sweet, buttery tart-crust dough filled with pastry cream – at least, that’s the standard version, but you’ll also see pasticciotti with sour cherries added to the cream filling, or sometimes even chocolate pasticciotti.

These squat, sarcophagus-looking sweets are made in just about every pasticceria in the region, and despite their simplicity and the ingredients involved, they are surprisingly lighter than you think and flavorful without too much sweetness. The pasticciotto is said to have been invented in the town of Galatina (south of Lecce) at Pasticceria Asoclane, which continues the tradition today.

Rustico/Rustici: Caffè Parisi (Nardò)

On the savory side of Puglia’s pastries, the rustico is a round turnover-like pocket made with puff pastry and stuffed with one of Puglia’s favorite ingredients – fresh mozzarella – as well as tomato sauce and bechamel, as the most common iteration. Rustici are perfect at any time of day, just as Caffè Parisi is – sitting outside in Piazza Salandra is the ideal way to soak up the atmosphere and architecture in Nardò, an architectural jewel in the heart of Puglia’s Salento region.

Focaccia Barese: Panificio di Gesù (Altamura)

Many regions of Italy have their own style of focaccia or similarly oil-topped bread – from Rome’s pizza bianca to Florence’s schiacciata to Liguria’s focaccia genovese. Puglia’s answer to focaccia – focaccia barese, originally supposedly from the city of Bari – is known (and beloved) for being topped with cherry tomatoes and olives, as well as other toppings on occasion. The round focacce are baked in pans that have been doused with olive oil, which when heated creates an extra crispy, deeply golden bottom.

You’ll find this focaccia throughout Puglia, not only in Bari – in fact, nearby Altamura is really the “capital” of Puglia’s breadmaking tradition and is well worth visiting for many forms of pane pugliese as well as for architecture and charm. The Panificio di Gesù is a worthy destination for bread lovers’ pilgrimages – besides the focaccia, you’ll want to get bags of taralli for the road, too.

Cotognata: Bar Cotognata Leccese (Lecce)

Quinces are a vastly underappreciated fruit – typically because they can’t really be enjoyed raw, and the cooking methods that bring out their incredible flavor and sweetness tend to be seen as labor-intensive – but not in Puglia.

When the early fall harvest arrives, many regions in Italy will make quinces (which look like a sort of irregularly enlarged hybrid of an apple and pear) into tarts, cakes, jam, or poached fruit. In Puglia they make a habit of turning them into cotognata – quince “paste” – which doesn’t really do justice to the delicacy that this is, though you will see it translated that way.

Think more along the lines of a candy-ish condiment or condiment-ish candy, a confection deserving of term “gelée” if there ever was one. Once quince season is underway, cotognata is often served at pasticcerie by the itty-bitty slice like a small, elegant, artisanal candy and is melt-in-your-mouth-good. Bar Cotognata in Lecce is, predictably, a sure place to try some.

Granita Pugliese: Super Mago di Gelo, (Polignano a Mare)

Luckily, Sicily isn’t the only region where granita is a popular frozen treat – Puglia also loves the full spectrum of granita flavors, which is a good thing in the heat of a pugliese summer when even gelato doesn’t seem cold enough to beat the heat. In the seaside town of Polignano a Mare, Super Mago di Gelo serves up several flavors of granita (as well as gelato), but the best and molto pugliese ones to get are mandorla and gelso nero (mulberry). It’s fun to either stand at the bar counter or get a cup of granita to stroll along the water with.

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