Fornelli Pronti: Dinner at the Butcher in Cisternino

Cisternino's food identity is built around one thing: fornelli pronti, butcher shops that double as restaurants. Walk into one along the town's central streets and the setup is the same everywhere. A glass counter of cuts up front, a wood-fired grill running in the back, and a small dining room or a few tables set up right on the cobblestones outside.

You choose your meat at the counter, they cook it while you wait, and you eat it a few feet from where it came off the fire. Bombette, thin rolls of pork wrapped around a piece of local cheese, are the thing to order first. Gnummareddi, seasoned lamb or veal offal wrapped and grilled on a skewer, is the local specialty most visitors have never heard of.

There's no menu to translate and no chef between you and the meat. You point, they cook, you sit down outside in a town most people only pass on their way to somewhere else.