The Amalfi Coast trattorias nobody talks about

Positano's restaurant terraces are beautiful and, increasingly, interchangeable — the same seafood platters, the same sea views, the same prices inflated for the crowd walking past. The better meals on the Amalfi Coast tend to be a few kilometers away, in towns that don't make the highlight reel.

Start in Praiano, a quieter fishing village between Positano and Amalfi that most tour buses drive straight past. Its handful of family-run trattorias serve what the boats bring in that morning, often with no printed menu — you ask what's fresh, and that's what you eat. Look for scialatielli ai frutti di mare, a thick hand-cut pasta with clams, mussels, and whatever else came off the boat, and totano e patate, squid stewed with potatoes in a way that turns up on almost no coastal restaurant's official menu but appears constantly on family tables.

Further along, in Cetara, the local specialty is colatura di alici — a fermented anchovy sauce that's the direct descendant of the ancient Roman garum, still made using recipes that haven't changed much in generations. A handful of tiny, unglamorous restaurants along the harbor serve it tossed simply through spaghetti, and it's worth planning a stop here specifically for that dish.

In the hill town of Ravello, away from the coastal road entirely, look past the restaurants with the famous garden views (worth visiting for the view, less so for the food) toward the smaller places used by locals — Ravello has its own culinary identity built around mountain produce brought down to a coastal table: wild greens, local cheese, and lemon used more for its leaves than its juice.

The pattern across all of these places is the same: the further a restaurant sits from a parking lot or a cruise-ship shuttle stop, the better the food tends to be, and the more likely you are to be the only table speaking a language other than Italian. That's usually the point.