Eating Our Way Through Puglia
One of the best parts about travelling through Puglia is, obviously, the food. Fresh seafood, handmade pasta, ridiculous focaccia, Aperol Spritzes in sunny courtyards — it’s basically impossible to have a bad day when that’s the itinerary.
During our trip through southern Italy, we ate our way through Monopoli, Gallipoli and Lecce, and found a few places that we’re still thinking about.
Some were planned, some were random finds, and one involved making the pasta ourselves. From one of the best focaccia sandwiches I’ve ever had to the winner of our unofficial Best Tiramisu in Italy competition, these are the places we loved eating in Puglia.
A Sentimento
📍 Monopoli, Italy
This place is SO cute.
A Sentimento has one of those quintessential Italian restaurant settings that makes you immediately happy you booked a table. We sat outside in the back courtyard, which I highly recommend if you can get a spot. It feels tucked away from everything, with that cozy, intimate atmosphere that makes you want to order another drink and stay way longer than you originally planned.
And speaking of drinks…
If you know, you know: Sarti Rosa Spritzes are surprisingly hard to find. We had been looking for them, and A Sentimento actually had them on the menu. Immediate bonus points.
The pizza was amazing, the drinks were great and the whole place just had such a fun vibe.
But the real surprise was dessert.
We ate our fair share of tiramisu while travelling around Italy, and the tiramisu here was our favourite of the entire trip. If you’re staying in Monopoli, put this one on your list.
TIP:
Make a reservation, especially if you want to sit outside in the courtyard.
Fioremio
📍 Monopoli, Italy
We absolutely loved Fioremio for brunch.
It’s part café, part flower shop, which already makes it pretty hard not to love. The whole space is bright, colourful and full of flowers, so even stopping in for coffee feels like a bit of an experience.
After days of pasta, pizza and seafood — not that we were complaining — it was nice to have a slower brunch morning here.
Everything we had was so yummy, and it’s the kind of spot where you can easily linger over coffee rather than rushing off to the next thing on your itinerary. It’s a small cafe, however they have seats inside and a few outside that we were able to snag.
Possibly the cutest part? When we left, they gave us a mini dried bouquet of flowers.
Did I need a miniature bouquet while travelling through Italy? No.
Did I immediately love it and carefully carry it around with me? Obviously.
If you’re looking for a cute breakfast or brunch spot in Monopoli, definitely check this place out.
La Vinaigrette
📍 Gallipoli, Italy
If you want seafood with a view in Gallipoli, La Vinaigrette is a great dinner option.
There’s a main restaurant downstairs, but they also have a large upstairs patio overlooking the water. Try to get a table upstairs if you can — especially around sunset.
This was one of those dinners where the setting is almost as memorable as the food.
We ordered the fresh seafood orecchiette, which was exactly the kind of dish I wanted to be eating while sitting beside the sea in southern Italy. Orecchiette is one of Puglia’s signature pastas, and pairing it with fresh seafood just makes sense when you’re this close to the coast.
Add a glass of wine, warm evening air and views over the water and you’ve pretty much nailed the Puglia dinner experience.
TIP:
Reservations are recommended, particularly if you want to sit upstairs.
Sforna Focaccia
📍 Gallipoli, Italy
I could have eaten these sandwiches every. single. day.
Sforna Focaccia is located right near Spiaggia della Purità, the beautiful little beach tucked alongside Gallipoli’s historic centre, which makes it the PERFECT stop before heading down to the water.
Their focaccia sandwiches are simple, fresh and ridiculously good.
And because they’re easy to take away, they’re ideal for a beach day, road trip or day of wandering around Gallipoli when you don’t necessarily want to stop for a full sit-down lunch.
There’s also something so satisfying about grabbing fresh Italian focaccia, walking a few minutes to the beach and eating it while looking out over the Ionian Sea.
This wasn’t some fancy, drawn-out dinner experience. It was just really, really good food — and honestly, it ended up being one of my favourite things we ate in Puglia.
Do not skip this one.
Le Garibaldine
📍 Gallipoli, Italy
Le Garibaldine was another cute little find in Gallipoli.
The restaurant has a small back patio that feels hidden away from the busier streets outside. It’s casual and cozy, making it a great choice when you want good food without turning dinner into a big production.
We came for the pasta, and the pasta did not disappoint.
By this point in the trip we’d eaten enough Italian pasta to consider ourselves extremely unqualified experts, and this was another meal that reminded us why eating your way around Italy never gets old.
Good pasta, a cute patio and a relaxed evening in Gallipoli — sometimes that’s really all you need.
Antica Posta
📍 Monopoli, Italy
Antica Posta was one of those restaurants where the whole experience just worked.
We loved the outdoor atmosphere here. There’s something about eating outside on a warm night in Monopoli that makes even a simple dinner feel special, and Antica Posta had exactly the kind of atmosphere we were looking for.
The service was also amazing.
We had fresh fish that was beautifully prepared and exactly what you want when you’re staying along the Adriatic coast. Puglia is surrounded by water, so if you’re a seafood person, this is definitely the place to take advantage of it.
And then there was dessert. Delicious.
Everything from the food to the service to the outdoor setting made this one of our favourite dinners in Monopoli.
Cooking Love
📍 Lecce, Italy
Okay, technically this wasn’t a restaurant.
But there was absolutely no way I was making a list about our favourite food experiences in Puglia without including Cooking Love.
We booked a cooking class in Lecce, and it ended up being one of the highlights of our entire trip. We wrote a separate blog on this experience if you want to learn more. Click Here!
Instead of simply eating another plate of pasta, we actually learned how to make it.
We made orecchiette and maccheroni by hand, which gave us a whole new appreciation for the amount of work that goes into those seemingly simple bowls of pasta we’d been happily inhaling all week.
And this wasn’t one of those cooking classes where you stand silently at a counter following instructions.
It felt like a proper Italian evening.
Before cooking, we grazed on an incredible spread of meats, cheeses, crackers and vegetables — including vegetables straight from the garden.
There was prosecco.
There was wine.
There was homemade limoncello.
There was pasta.
Basically, all the major food groups.
The experience was relaxed, social and genuinely fun, and it gave us a chance to experience Puglian food in a completely different way.
If you have a few days in Lecce, I would absolutely make room in your itinerary for a cooking class. Eating handmade orecchiette is great. Sitting down to eat handmade orecchiette that you actually made yourself while drinking Italian wine is even better.
I may have been awarded orecchiette queen, which was both hilarious and amazing, since I had never made orecchiette in my life and learned that I was apparently good at it! Haha!
This was easily one of the highlights of our trip! If you’re heading to Italy, we definitely recommend adding this cooking class to your itinerary. Here’s the link to book your spot.
Eating Our Way Through Puglia
Puglia quickly became one of our favourite places in Italy for food because it never felt like it needed to be overly complicated.
Some of our favourite meals were beautiful sit-down dinners overlooking the water. Others involved grabbing a focaccia sandwich and taking it to the beach.
And then there was the homemade pasta, endless seafood, courtyard pizzas, tiny flower bouquets and enough tiramisu to confidently start ranking them.
If you’re planning a trip through Monopoli, Gallipoli or Lecce, these are all spots we’d happily go back to — but if you make it to A Sentimento, seriously…
Get the tiramisu.
