ROSAMUNDA MALLORCA

Rosamunda is a very small Italian restaurant in Palma, run by Francesca and Giacomo, a married couple from the centre-north of Italy. He is from Parma, she is from Piacenza — two cities of Emilia you can clearly recognise on the menu. The place sits on Carrer de l'Arxiduc Lluís Salvador, the main axis of the neighbourhood that shares its name, north of Plaça d'Espanya and between Plaça Fleming and Plaça de l'Obelisc. This is a residential quarter, not a going-out strip, and that shapes the place. The dining room holds only a handful of tables, the host waits on them herself, and the kitchen cooks for a manageable number of guests. Booking is therefore not a courtesy but a condition: the house has grown by word of mouth and is usually full. What the two of them set out to do sounds modest — to pass on the dishes of their childhood and their grandmothers' recipes. On the menu it turns into something very concrete: there are things on it you will hardly find anywhere else in Palma. Pasta that is rewritten every week The pasta is made in house, fresh every day, and the pasta section changes weekly — what is on the menu this week may be gone the next. What stays constant is the method: durum and egg dough, worked by hand. The tagliatelle come with a ragù alla bolognese drawn out for hours over a low flame. Tortelli are filled with ricotta, mascarpone and fresh spinach and served with clarified butter, sage and parmigiano. Alongside them, ravioli stuffed with salt cod in a tomato sauce with basil, capers and olives, potato gnocchi in a sauce of porcini, shiitake, portobello and button mushrooms, linguine with a classic pesto alla genovese, and black spaghetti coloured with cuttlefish ink under a ragù of octopus, squid and cuttlefish. One plate stands right outside the frame: spaghetti with anchovy cream and capers, burrata mousse and crumbled Artà biscuits over the top — a Mallorcan biscuit on an Emilian dish. What came over from Parma and Piacenza The dishes worth the trip sit a little out of sight. Nidi di rondine, swallows' nests, are rolled baked pasta filled with roast suckling pig, mushrooms, béchamel and parmigiano; they are counted as typical of Giacomo's home region. The cappellacci owe their name to their hat shape: egg dough filled with porcini, parmigiano and ricotta, finished with butter. From Piacenza, the home town of Francesca, come pisarei e fasò — small gnocchi of bread and flour with beans, tomato and parmigiano, the culinary emblem of that city. And then there is a hybrid that could only exist on this island: rigatoni in tomato sauce with lightly spicy sobrassada. Why the pizza at Rosamunda Mallorca tastes different The pizzas are expressly not Neapolitan. The dough matures for two days and is baked crisp rather than soft and airy; the tomato sauce is made in house, and in several places burrata goes onto the base instead of industrial mozzarella. The range runs from the margherita, which tests the dough most honestly, to toppings that point firmly north: alpina with speck, smoked scamorza and mushrooms; la capra e il tartufo with truffle sauce, goat's cheese and green asparagus; zucca e pancetta on a base of pumpkin cream. The house's own Rosamunda joins brie and mozzarella with rolled Italian pancetta. Beside them a dairy-free rossa with anchovies, roasted and semi-dried tomatoes, olives and capers, stuffed focaccias with porchetta or scamorza, and a vegetariana of vegetables alone. Pasta for your own kitchen A good part of the business goes over the counter. Frozen fresh pasta, ready-to-heat baked dishes, frozen sauces, cheeses and desserts can all be taken away: lasagne after the family recipe, melanzane alla parmigiana, cannelloni with meat, with ricotta and gorgonzola or with pumpkin and salsiccia, tortelli with a Tuscan meat filling, mezzelune with artichokes, cappellacci with porcini. The house sends video instructions along with the pasta so that nothing goes wrong in your own kitchen. The wine list is short and almost entirely Italian, from vermentino and lugana through chianti and cannonau to valpolicella ripasso, with Italian beer and the usual digestivi from limoncello to fernet — and, since you are here after all, Mallorcan hierbas.