I’d exchanged a couple of chat messages with Davide Giribaldi before going to Fari Trattoria. Davide is the chef/owner of the restaurant Cien Fuegos and served as a consultant to the recently-opened San Miguel restaurant Fari, particularly in developing their menu. One of his prime recommendations was to be sure to experience the linguine carbonara.

Carbonara is, without a doubt, one of Don Day’s Wife’s five favorite dishes. She serves it at least once a month and, when she’s making the sauce, I know not to disturb her. There is a very slim line between a great carbonara and scrambled eggs. The carbonara was top of my mind and top of her must-have list on our first visit to Fari.

Don Day’s Wife wasn’t the only potentially tough critic. We were at Fari with Mark and Monique. Until he discovered San Miguel de Allende (and Monique), Mark was the chef in a very traditional Italian restaurant in California.

But before I tell you about how the carbonara was at San Miguel’s newest Italian restaurant, let me share some facts about one of Rome’s signature dishes.

Though many people might throw some of this and a little of that into the mix, purists will tell you that there should be no garlic, no parsley, no onion, no peas, and definitely no cream in the sauce. Classic carbonara has only five ingredients: egg yolks, Pecorino cheese, guanciale, black pepper and pasta. 

There was a time in San Miguel when Pecorino cheese was hard to find and Parmesan might be acceptable. There was a time in this town that guanciale (the cured cheeks of a pig) was almost impossible to find and pancetta or bacon was very acceptable. Since the arrival of City Market, I expect only the classic ingredients in a restaurant’s carbonara.

Fari’s linguine carbonara arrived at our table. There was lots of salty pecorino piled on top. Underneath the sheep cheese, the guanciale had just the right crisp. The fresh pasta was perfectly al dente. It was hard for me to believe that such a wonderful sauce had no cream.

Mark called it, “A classic!”.

Don Day’s Wife, who despite preferring dried rather than fresh noodles in her carbonara, said, “They really nailed it.”

Monique remarked, “It is the best carbonara I’ve ever had.”

But what about the rest of the dishes we had on our first visit to Fari Trattoria? We did a lot of sharing, splitting three of the appetizers and a pizza frita between the four of us.

Fari’s artichoke a la leña is, according to owner Toño Aranda, “about the furthest we stray from the traditional trattoria menu”.

Unlike most artichoke dishes, that require a frustrating and sloppy struggle to remove the flesh from the petals, everything on Fari’s plate was edible. It was a welcome change.

Arancini is one of Mark Tamiso’s signature dishes. He knows the importance of crunchy on the outside, munchy on the inside. Fari’s deep-fried delights were smaller than those in Sicilia, but they measured up to his standards in taste.

Chef Yesica Rivas worked at another of the Aranda brothers’ restaurants, Bocaciega, before moving to Fari. At Bocaciega, she developed her craft with head chef José Bazan who once said to me, “It is as important to cook for the eyes as it is for the mouth.”

His influence seemed evident when we saw the carpaccio de rez. It was a fabulous feast for the eyes. I was afraid that the other ingredients…the caper berries, the mustard seeds, the mayonnaise might detract from the taste of the beef; they didn’t.

Though it’s similar to a calzone, deep-fried pizza is something you seldom see in a trattoria. Fari has two styles, a three cheese and one with Mozzarella, pomodoro and basil pesto. At 150 pesos, either would make a nice, light, affordable lunch.

We weren’t finished. You can’t measure the worth of an Italian restaurant by the taste of just one pasta when you’re taking it for its test drive. When you’ve got six to choose from, it’s tough to get four people to agree on two that they’re going to share.

It took a long time to decide on the arrabiata and the mushroom but not as long as they probably sat in Fari’s kitchen. They were barely warm when they arrived.

We were stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys. But not done yet. There were two things leading me astray. A pile of Caputo flour sacks and the smell of the wood smoke coming from an oven.

One of the other things Davide Giribaldi had recommended to me was the white pizza with mortadella. I next to never order a pizza without red sauce and, as much as I adore mortadella, I couldn’t remember ever having it as a pizza topping.

Along with the cheque, we ordered the pizza to go. Don Day’s Wife and I planned to have it later that evening. The mortadella was the expensive Italian with pistachios and it handled reheating without taking away from its texture or taste.

Toño Aranda is somewhat notorious for choosing obscure names for his restaurants. I asked him about Fari.

“It’s the Italian equivalent of farola, the Spanish word for streetlight”, he told me. “It’s very short. We like it.”

On our first visit to Fari, the kitchen shone brightly, we liked it, and, I expect, very shortly, we’ll return.

Fari Trattoria is located at Salida a Celaya #5 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, The restaurant is open from 1:30 to 10:00 pm on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; 2:00 to 10:00 pm on Saturday; 2:00 to 8:00 pm on Sunday.