Food & Wine
Puglia Street Food: What to Eat and Where
Some of the best food in Puglia never sees a restaurant table. It is fried in a doorway, wrapped in paper, grilled over coals in the back of a butcher’s shop and eaten standing up with your fingers. This is the region’s street food, cheap, unpretentious and completely delicious, and it changes as you travel from Bari down to the Salento.
Here are the Puglian street foods worth going out of your way for, and where to find them.
Puglia street food at a glance
| Dish | What it is | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Panzerotto | Fried dough pocket oozing tomato and mozzarella | Bari |
| Sgagliozze | Fried squares of salted polenta | Bari Vecchia |
| Popizze / pettole | Soft fried balls of leavened dough | Bari / the Salento |
| Focaccia barese | Soft focaccia with tomatoes, olives and oregano | Bari |
| Bombette | Grilled pork rolls stuffed with cheese | Valle d’Itria (Cisternino) |
| Puccia | Round Salento bread, split and filled | Lecce and the Salento |
| Rustico leccese | Puff pastry with béchamel, mozzarella and tomato | Lecce |
| Panino col polpo | Octopus roll and fried seafood | The coast |
Bari: the street food capital
No town in Puglia does street food like Bari. The old town, Bari Vecchia, is a maze of lanes where food is cooked in doorways and sold to whoever walks past.
Panzerotti, the fried Puglian classic, at a beach kiosk in Campomarino di Maruggio. Our own photo.
The king is the panzerotto, a half-moon of dough filled with tomato and mozzarella and deep-fried until it puffs golden and blisters. Bite in carefully: the inside is molten. Then there are sgagliozze, simple squares of fried polenta, salted and served hot in a paper cone, still sold from doorways by women who have made them for decades. Look out too for popizze, soft fried balls of leavened dough (called pettole further south) and the famous focaccia barese, a thick, oil-rich focaccia studded with cherry tomatoes, olives and oregano, sold by weight from every bakery. Down at the old port, Bari also has a raw-seafood tradition: locals eat raw octopus, sea urchins and mussels straight from the fishermen. It is one of the reasons a Bari street food tour is such a good way in.
The Valle d’Itria: bombette and the fornello pronto
Inland, in the trulli country of the Valle d’Itria, street food means meat and smoke. The speciality is the bombetta: a thin slice of pork, usually capocollo, rolled around a nugget of cheese and grilled over coals until the outside chars and the middle runs. The place to eat them is a fornello pronto, a butcher’s shop that doubles as a grill: you choose your meat from the counter, they cook it on the spot, and you eat it at a paper-covered table with a glass of red. The towns of Cisternino and Martina Franca are famous for exactly this, and it is one of the most memorable meals in the region.
The Salento: puccia and rustico
Down in the heel around Lecce, the street food changes again. The everyday staple is the puccia, a round, soft Salento bread that is split and stuffed with whatever you like, cold cuts, cheese, grilled vegetables, tuna, then warmed through so it collapses into a perfect handheld lunch. The version baked with black olives in the dough, puccia con le olive, is a thing of joy on its own.
The other Lecce classic is the rustico leccese, a disc of flaky puff pastry filled with béchamel, mozzarella and tomato, seasoned with a little pepper and nutmeg, eaten warm from a bakery as a mid-morning snack. And while it is technically a pastry rather than a savoury bite, no Salento morning is complete without a pasticciotto, a small shortcrust case filled with custard, still warm from the oven.
A few tips for eating on the street
- Follow the queue. The best panzerotti and sgagliozze come from unassuming places with a line of locals outside, not the tourist-facing counters.
- Go in the evening. Much of Bari’s street food scene comes alive after dark, when the old-town squares fill up and the fryers get going.
- Carry cash. Doorway vendors and small friggitorie rarely take cards, and everything costs a few euros.
- Pettole are a Christmas thing. If you visit in December, the smell of frying pettole is everywhere, tied to the feasts of early Advent.
Street food is Puglia at its most honest and its most fun. For the bigger picture on the region’s cooking, see what to eat in Puglia, and for more surprises, our fun facts about Puglia, including why grandmothers still make pasta on the street in Bari.
Raised in the province of Brindisi, 30 years in Puglia. About this site