Mr. 100 Tiramisù Review | The Best Tiramisu in Rome?

Here is my working assumption about restaurants I find on Instagram: roughly half of them are terrible. Not bad, exactly. Terrible in a specific, modern way, photogenic, queued-for, thoroughly mediocre, built for a camera rather than a mouth. I have eaten a lot of beautiful, disappointing food in the last few years, and I have learned to treat a viral dessert with the same suspicion I’d apply to a wine described as “an experience.”

And yet. Show me a place that claims to do a hundred tiramisu and I have no defences whatsoever. I love tiramisu. I love it in the uncomplicated way you love things you didn’t choose to love. So when Mr. 100 Tiramisù kept appearing on my phone, I did the thing I tell other people not to do, and went.

Reader, it is the other half.

Finding it is half the pleasure

It is not on the square. That matters, because the places actually on Piazza Navona are, almost without exception, charging you rent for the view. Mr. 100 is tucked down Via dei Sediari, one of those narrow Roman alleys that looks like a service lane until you are in it, and then turns out to be lined with the good stuff.

Next door, and I mean directly next door, is an old bookshop of the kind that stops you mid-stride. Dark wood, floor-to-ceiling, the sort of stock that makes you want to learn Italian properly rather than badly. I lost ten minutes in there before I’d eaten anything, which turned out to be excellent planning, because you are going to be waiting anyway.

The queue, and the system

There is a queue. There is always a queue. There is also, apparently, a system, though I could not for the life of me tell you what it is. There are two lines, one for eating in and one for taking away, and beyond that it operates on some form of institutional memory: nobody hands you a ticket, nobody calls a number, and yet the staff know precisely who is next, in what order, and what they asked for. It should not work. It works perfectly.

I have queued at places where the waiting is the point, a piece of theatre designed to make the thing at the end feel earned. This is not that. This is a very small room with a very large menu and more people wanting in than can physically fit, and the staff have simply got good at it. Twenty minutes, in my case. Ten of them in a bookshop.

A hundred tiramisu is a genuinely stupid number

And I mean that admiringly. Inside, the space is tiny, and the menu is not. A hundred versions of one dessert is the sort of idea that should collapse under its own gimmickry, and the saving grace is that they have organised it properly: the flavours are grouped into families, fruit, chocolate, with alcohol, without, so you are not reading a hundred names, you are picking a lane and then picking within it. It is the same trick a good wine list should pull and mostly doesn’t, as I have complained about at length.

I did not agonise. I went Nutella, immediately, the way you do when you have already decided on the walk over and are only pretending to read.

The chap behind the counter gave me a look. Not a sneer, nothing like it, a wink. The particular expression of somebody who has watched several hundred adults scan a hundred sophisticated options and choose the chocolate spread, and who thinks, correctly, that they are all right.

The tiramisu itself

Here is where I expected to be let down, and was not.

It was creamy without being claggy, which is the whole game with a Nutella anything. Rich, obviously. Decadent, certainly, this is not a dessert with any interest in your intentions. But the thing that surprised me, and the thing that separates a good tiramisu from a merely enormous one, was that it stayed light. There is a version of this dish that sits in you like a decision you regret. This one did not. It ate like something whipped rather than assembled, and the hazelnut ran through the mascarpone instead of sitting on top of it shouting.

I will register the one criticism I have seen others make, because it is fair and I would rather say it than pretend: if what you want is a rigorously classical tiramisu, the kind where the coffee-soaked savoiardi do most of the talking, this is not that shrine. The flavour here leads. The sponge is a supporting actor. Purists will grumble, and they are not wrong on the facts, only on whether it matters. I would point them at the classic, which they also make, and get on with my Nutella.

And an Aperol spritz, because Rome

I had it with an Aperol spritz, which on paper is a slightly ridiculous pairing and in practice is the best decision I made all afternoon. The bitterness cuts straight through the hazelnut, the bubbles reset your palate between spoonfuls, and the whole thing tips from “very good dessert” into something you sit back from. Sweet and bitter, cold and creamy. It is the same logic that makes an espresso martini work after dinner, only sunnier and considerably less likely to keep you up.

If spritz is not your thing, the other obvious route is a glass of something Italian and fizzy, and I have made the case for and against Prosecco elsewhere. But sitting in a Roman alley in the afternoon with an orange drink and a chocolate pudding is not a moment that requires optimisation.

Is it the best tiramisu in Rome?

Yes. With one honest caveat, which is that “best in Rome” is a claim made by roughly nine thousand establishments and a city that has been arguing about food since before England existed. I have not eaten every tiramisu in Rome. Nobody has. Anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or in hospital.

What I can say is this. It is the best one I have had there, by a clear margin. It is better than it needs to be, given the queue outside would form regardless. And it passed the only test that actually counts with a viral restaurant: I would go back, pay again, and wait again, without the camera.

If you go

Go slightly off-peak if you can; the queue at three in the afternoon is a different proposition to the queue at eight. Decide roughly what family you want before you reach the counter, fruit, chocolate, boozy, not, because the person behind you has also been thinking about this for twenty minutes. Eat in if there is any chance of a seat, because half the charm is the room. Take the bookshop detour. And order the Aperol spritz.

Also: order the thing you actually want. There are a hundred options and a strong temptation to prove something with your choice. Nobody is marking you. The Nutella is superb, the staff already know, and the wink is friendly.

Instagram gets it wrong about half the time. Down an alley off Piazza Navona, next to a beautiful old bookshop, in a room barely big enough to turn around in, it has got it right. Just be prepared to wait, and do not overthink the flavour. Somewhere in that hundred is the one you already wanted.

A personal review based on my own visit. I paid for my own tiramisu, which given the price was not exactly a sacrifice. Details and prices correct at the time of writing and change often; check before you travel. Please drink responsibly.