This is the address with the most important history and the most awkward piece of advice on the island’s whole food section. The Bar Roma, behind the sailors’ church at Marina Grande, is named by Gambero Rosso as the place where the lingua di Procida was born in its modern version: in 1950 Pasquale Mazziotti, a Neapolitan who had moved to the island, replaced the classic custard with the local lemon cream. The awkward advice is this: take the lingua at the counter, do not sit down.
Why at the counter and not at a table
The travellers’ rating is 3.4 out of 5 from about 235 reviews, and it is the lowest among the places I write about on this site. Reading what people write, the picture is clear and surprisingly consistent: the cakes are praised, the table service is heavily criticised. Waits, brusque manners, bills that do not convince.
It is not a contradiction: it is a pastry workshop with a room attached, and the two things run at different speeds. The practical solution is banal. You go in, you order at the counter, you eat standing up as the Procidans do, you leave. That way you take the good part of this place — which is its historic reason for existing — and you leave outside the part that drags the score down.
If you want to sit down and take half an hour, on the same seafront there is Bar Dal Cavaliere, and that is where I would send you.
What to take
The lemon lingua is the obvious order, and here more than anywhere it makes historical sense: it is the pastry that made the limone pane cream the island’s standard filling. Elongated puff pastry, crisp, sugar granella, yellow cream. There is also the chocolate version, which is good but is a variant.
Alongside it you find the classic Neapolitan repertoire: babà al rum, sfogliatelle. They are good; they are not the reason you are here. You will not find the lingua in a pastry shop in Naples: it is not related to the sfogliatella and it has never crossed the channel. This is one of the two or three places in the world where it makes sense to eat it.
One detail that helps you choose: the lingua is a pastry to eat straight away. Hand-pulled puff pastry keeps its crispness for a short time, and after an hour in a bag it becomes another thing. Buying six to take home is a recurring temptation and almost always a disappointment.
On the etymology of the name, if you are wondering, the sources do not agree: some trace it back to the shape of the ox tongue, another to the place name of the Spiaggia della Lingua. There is no established answer, and anyone who gives you one with confidence is picking a version.
Practical information
The address is Via Roma 164, on the harbour front, and the phone is +39 081 896 7460. I am not publishing the opening hours because I have not verified them: for a town pastry shop the rule is early morning and an afternoon closing, but I do not want to give you a timetable I have not checked. On prices I have no reliable data and I am leaving the fields empty.
If you are doing the round of the island’s breakfasts, the three addresses are this one, the Bar Dal Cavaliere and the Paname’ bakery, all a few hundred metres from one another on the same seafront. Three versions of the same lingua, three different results: it is the cheapest way to understand Procida’s pastry.
