Acqua e Farina’s new menu at Keong Saik is a love letter to Italy, written in pasta and dough

There’s something oddly satisfying about a restaurant that doesn’t try too hard. Acqua e Farina — which translates simply to “water and flour” in Italian — is exactly that.

Named after the most foundational ingredients in Italian cooking, the restaurant has built its reputation on the belief that great food doesn’t need to announce itself. It just needs the right hands, the right ingredients, and a genuine respect for tradition.

Where Milan meets Naples

Those hands belong to two chefs who couldn’t come from more different corners of Italy. Chef Antonio Manetto hails from Naples in the south, while chef Roberto Galbiati calls Milan in the north home.

Together, they’ve spent nearly a decade doing what many Italian restaurants in Singapore claim, but few actually deliver — bringing the full breadth of Italian regional cooking to the table, without compromise.

The duo first opened at The Rail Mall along Upper Bukit Timah Road in 2016, building an under-the-radar loyal following among residents in the west. Then in August 2024, they brought Acqua e Farina to Keong Saik Road — a neighbourhood that, for better or worse, has become something of a litmus test for whether a restaurant has the staying power to hold its own among the crowd.

It’s been less than a year since the Keong Saik outlet opened, and the kitchen is already adding new chapters to the menu.

The latest update spans both locations and introduces a curated set of lunch specials alongside new a la carte additions — a mix that spans the full length of the Italian boot, from Milanese sensibility, to deeply Neapolitan soul.

A mid-day meal, the Italian way

Fitting for the lunch spread we were about to tuck into, we tried the newly added mortadella and scamorza cheese rolls (S$17).

Slices of mortadella are wrapped around a core of scamorza — an Italian smoked cheese with a mild, slightly elastic pull — then double-dredged in egg and breadcrumbs, then rested in the fridge for a few hours before being deep-fried fresh to order.

The result is a golden, audibly crisp shell that gives way to molten, stretchy cheese and the soft, fatty cushion of the mortadella beneath. It comes plated over a housemade tomato sauce with a quiet kick of chilli — just enough to cut through the richness without stealing the show.

The next lunch special was the linguine tossed with smoked salmon in a cream pesto sauce (S$23), a dish that resulted from a flavour combination introduced to chef Antonio over two decades ago.

After numerous tweaks to get the flavour balance just right, today this dish features Norwegian smoked salmon pan-fried, flambeed with white wine, then finished with heavy cream and al dente Italian linguine.

The heat goes off before a generous fold of fresh, housemade pesto goes in, keeping it vivid and aromatic rather than reducing it to something muddy. It’s creamy and rich on one hand, bright and herbaceous on the other — an unexpectedly memorable dish that you wouldn’t think much of, when listed plainly on a menu.

And then there’s Acqua e Farina’s Keong Saik signature, the pizza montanara (S$38). First introduced when the outlet opened in 2024, this update sees new variations, such as the pizza montanara salami (S$24).

Its process is labour-intensive by design: A dough made from two types of Italian pizza flour, left to proof for 36 hours, hand-pressed and deep-fried until golden, then immediately topped and baked.

The twice-cooking gives it a crust that’s genuinely unlike most pizzas you’d encounter here — shatteringly crisp on the outside, pillowy within, and notably light despite the frying. This salami version goes the bolder route with a piquant tomato base, melted mozzarella, and slices of pork salami, whose savouriness is kept in check by the sauce’s brightness.

Steeped in tradition

From there, we moved on to the a la carte additions, starting with sardine fritte (S$34). Fresh wild-caught sardines are air-flown in thrice a week from the Mediterranean, deboned and butterflied entirely by hand before being dredged in flour and breadcrumbs and fried.

Here, the sourcing does the heavy lifting; these are sardines from the Tyrrhenian Sea, prized in southern Italy for their fuller, richer flavour, compared to cold-water varieties.

The housemade tartar sauce alongside is a straightforward aioli base mixed with chopped onions and capers, adding a briny, creamy counterpoint to the crunch.

Of course, what is an Italian spread at Acqua e Farina, if not for more pasta options, and so we rightfully dove into the linguine alla luciana (S$38). Named not for a person, but for the luciani — the fishermen of Santa Lucia, a coastal district in chef Antonio’s hometown of Naples — this dish carries the weight of a genuine culinary tradition.

Mediterranean octopus is sauteed with onions and garlic, then pressure-cooked low and slow for at least 50 minutes with red wine, cherry tomatoes, olives, and a touch of chilli, before resting another 15 to 20 minutes in its own steam.

The result is an octopus that yields completely without any fight, folded through al dente linguine with the deeply reduced, wine-dark sauce. And yes, it’s available as a non-spicy iteration, if managing chilli heat isn’t your forte.

Just before desserts, we enjoyed a final savoury plate of rigatoni alla vaccinara (S$37) — and honestly, few dishes carry their origins as honestly as this one.

The vaccinara were 19th-century Roman butchers, often paid in offal and lesser cuts — including oxtail — who, out of necessity, slow-cooked them into something extraordinary. 

Acqua e Farina’s version honours that patience: Black angus oxtail from Australian supplier Stockyard Beef is seared, then slow-cooked with onions, celery, carrots, and tomato sauce in the oven for at least five hours, before being transferred to a terracotta pot for another three hours.

After an hour’s rest, the meat — gently pulled from the bone — and its deeply reduced sauce are tossed with rigatoni and finished with a generous hand of imported parmigiano reggiano. It’s bold and unglamorous, in the most delicious way possible.

And if you still have room for a cheeky treat, the gelato al pistacchio (S$10) is not to be skipped.

Made entirely in-house from raw Sicilian pistachios — widely regarded as among the finest in the world, owing to the mineral-rich volcanic soil in which they’re grown — the nuts are gently roasted upon arrival to coax out their flavour before being ground into chef Roberto’s own gelato base.

No colourants, no artificial flavourings; just an honest, deeply nutty scoop that’s the colour of the nut itself, rather than the lurid green you might expect. (Apparently, both chefs taste-test it daily under the guise of quality control. After trying it, I can’t say I blame them!)

The sum of its parts

What struck us most about Acqua e Farina’s new menu isn’t any single dish — it’s the cumulative effect of eating through it. A Neapolitan street snack here, a Roman butcher’s legacy there, a coastal fisherman’s tradition folded onto a plate of linguine.

Enjoyed together, it reads less like a menu refresh and more like a quiet argument for why Italian regional cooking deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms — not as a broad, catch-all cuisine, but as a collection of deeply specific, deeply human stories told through food.

That specificity is what chefs Antonio and Roberto do best. Every dish on this new menu has a provenance — an origin story, a technique that takes hours, an ingredient that was worth the logistics of flying in. And in a dining landscape where “authentic” gets thrown around rather freely, Acqua e Farina earns the word.

This was a hosted tasting.

For more ideas on what to eat, check out Chu and Co’s new Shu Bakery, and these 12 spots for fresh & delicious kimbap.