Antico Arco

Seventeen years holding the pass

Fundim Gjepali keeps the plate aligned before it leaves the pass. As Executive Chef at Antico Arco in Rome, he has worked this station since 2008, a tenure that gives the room its steadiness rather than its noise. The restaurant opened in 1996 on Piazzale Aurelio, above Trastevere on the Gianicolo, and Gjepali’s kitchen now carries the modern chapter of that address. His cooking here is described in terms of balance, precision, seasonality and respect for the ingredient, with Roman memory kept close enough to read but not left untouched. He also holds the Executive Chef title at Padam Boutique Hotel & Restaurant in Tirana, so his work moves between two cities without turning into two languages. The quoted line attached to his hospitality, “Our dream has always been to experience a place that is like a happy island for us who work there and for those who come to visit us,” belongs to a practical view of the dining room. The brigade has to function. The guest has to feel the temperature of that order.

Roman dishes, tightened at the bench

The menu at Antico Arco is built between tasting menus and à la carte, with a vegetarian path set beside dishes that revisit Roman and Italian forms. Gjepali’s better-known plates include carbonara with black truffle, tagliolini with duck cacciatore ragout and Loch Fyne salmon, alongside raw amberjack with lime, ginger and crisp green beans, pigeon with red wine reduction, and Fassona Piemontese tartare with smoked foie gras, caper powder and 36-month aged balsamic reduction. The method is not a rejection of the old plate. It is closer to tightening a seam: richer elements held by acid, texture set against softness, familiar pasta carried into a more measured register. Bread matters in that architecture too, from focaccia to rosemary grissini, onion bread and house loaves made for scarpetta. The kitchen’s discipline sits in those small decisions, where generosity arrives as a chef’s extra or a shared tasting portion, not as excess on the plate.

A room above Trastevere

The room works in a quieter key than the view might suggest. Antico Arco sits near Porta San Pancrazio, Villa Aurelia and the Fontanone, with Rome below the terrace, but the craft happens at closer range: the pass, the counter, the exchanged plate, the glass set down with enough time for conversation to continue. Service is warm and professional, and the atmosphere can lift when the room fills without losing its conversational line. That balance suits Gjepali’s cooking. His own sentence, “It makes more sense to put solid gastronomic culture on the table than trends, which pass by definition,” reads less like a maxim than a station note. At Antico Arco, that culture lands in the carbonara with black truffle and the tagliolini with duck cacciatore ragout.