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Comment by Foomf | Hacker News Reader

The headline makes it sound like they restored the fast food joint and it is going to be serving food to the public.

Agree. Would be awesome for someone to open a replica nearby with close enough food served within.

Not sure about Pompeii specifically but from what I've heard of food in the Roman empire, tastes have changed dramatically since then. I'm afraid a historic restaurant would often be either disgusting or very far from historical. There might exist more common ground, but people in the empire ate things like field mouse.

If you enjoy modern foods from all around the world, it's very unlikely that you wouldn't enjoy Roman food. Things have changed since 2kya, but not that much. Although ingredients and tastes have changed somewhat, many of the same food products are used in extremely similar forms in exactly the same region. Not everyone was chasing the complexity of the elite Roman table. And to those who claim that complex flavors like garum are now out of vogue or disgusting, I present the modern equivalent: colatura di alici (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colatura_di_alici), an ingredient in classic, typical dishes from south Italy.

Field mouse sounds tasty. Can't be far from cui.

I've had cui (mostly to share pictures). I thought it was good, but idk how field mouse would be. Cui (guinea pig for the uninitiated) has a decent amount of meat on it. Field mice are so tiny, a chicken wing has has to have more meat on it. I'm presuming that when they ate field mice 2000 years ago, they're eating the entire thing with all organs except for maybe the intestines.

The mice were fattened in a special vessel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glirarium) which tricked them into preparing for hibernation, which fattened them up significantly. Still probably not a lot in them.

Worcestershire sauce is another garum analogue.

The list of foods in the article sounds fine for modern tastes (apart from the snails maybe). I'm sure it would have been prepared very differently, but that never stopped us calling things "Chinese food" etc in the west.

Not sure what you mean by "modern tastes" but snails are still widely eaten in regional recipes throughout Italy.

Lots of nicer places serve snails where I am in the Southern US. You can buy cans of them at the grocery and all you need is the shells to serve them in. A little garlic and parsley butter is all you need.

Here in Spain at least snails are still very common.

Yes, also France and parts of Germany.

> but that never stopped us calling things "Chinese food" etc in the west.

I once collected a quote from a writeup on dailywtf, an aside that went:

"I should mention that I mean real Chinese food, not that non-deep-fried stuff they serve over in China."

The intended joke, obviously, is on people who think the American label "Chinese food" must reflect something similar to the food they have in China.

After spending years in Shanghai, eating local food, seeing the ads in bakery windows for "FRIED COOKIES", I still find the quote funny, but mostly for the idea that they might serve non-fried food in China. There is some, but it is most certainly not the norm.

Snails are common.

Almost always prepared "French style" with garlic-butter sauce which kind of masks the true flavor of the snail. By themselves the snails have a mild vegetative flavor with a bit of umami.

The only other preparation I've heard of was pickling. And also in frittata (omelet). It would be interesting to know how the Romans prepared snails.

I also heard the more esoteric food was something the rich ate, but the food for common people is something that is still served and delicious.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210719-what-did-the-anc...

Dormice not fieldmice- and I think they still eat those in parts of Central Europe, particularly Slovenia and Croatia.

It might be. However, I am from these parts of the world, and never heard of it.

They have those Roman fast food joint ruins on Via Appia too. Highly recommending the aqueduct bike tour.

Someone really should build a replica.

I kept reading through, waiting for the "and now they will serve food here" part, until about one paragraph before the end.

What a shame, I was really hoping to get drunk on spicy wine and eat a bunch of snails and baked cheese.

Don't you dare tempt me with a good time

…that sounds absolutely delicious?

It wouldn't be the same without Terry Jones narrating it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCv-JfyOMk&t=430s

I'd like some fossilized pizza please.

> fossilized pizza

It's here:

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/07/ancient-bread/

https://museum-of-artifacts.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-carbonise...

You joke, but the ovens in Pompeii (pictured at link above) look a lot like the wood-fired pizza domes down the road in Naples.

The Romans could have made flatbread with cheese, herbs and fish or meat bits on it. But no tomatoes until they came back from the Americas in the 1500s. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/noodles/2018/07/03/history-of...

Typical archeology journalism.

That was exactly what I expected.

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