Locanda Rivoli, Lecce. Local cooking, but pasta is a problem

3rd September.
After the hit and miss meal at the hotel, we were pleased to find lunch for ourselves in Lecce. Using Trip Advisor, my first two choices did not seem to exist any more, and this was a random choice. If I had checked it out first, I would have read about the pasta problem, but we found it out for ourselves. Otherwise we had a very interesting lunch. There is a web site at http://www.locandarivoli.it/ but it will need a translation. Like many places in Puglia, there is no tradition of international tourists (even though they had a menu in English of sorts) and only one of the staff had sufficient English.
To start, I had mozarella stuffed with cream.

It was not exactly cream inside, but some sort of cream cheese. This was a very rich dish, and probably more than one person could handle on their own. Because it was there on the menu, I ordered intestines stuffed with liver. This was sold by the piece at 2euros a piece, and they were a little confused when I only asked for one piece, but this was only a taster.

You cannot get a real feel for the size here, but it is the size of a small fat sausage, and that is really what it was like: a spicy liver sausage. Again very rich, and I think I would not have wanted to have a meal exclusively of these, but it is probably a local taste. Scored an 8.5 on the CHOF scale. Not for the squeamish or those who do not eat offal.

My main course was a local pasta which translated as fingers, and seems to be common in the area with clams (vongole).

This was tasty and hot enough but was hard work getting the clams out of the shells. My wife's pasta dish turned out to have undercooked hard pasta, beyond al dente. This had been noted before at this restaurant, and it is strange that they persisted in undercooking pasta despite the comments on TripAdvisor. Presumably they don't look or understand, or have no interest, or may be this is normal. We will never know, but take this as a warning.

The local pie we shared for desert was underwhelming, and was a bit like custard tart. Local pie for local folk.

So, all in all, an interesting meal, but diminished by the hard uncooked pasta. A feature of our trip was the rather hit and miss nature of eating out, and the reputation for consistently good restaurant food that is the norm for Italy was mised in Puglia. They still have some way to go.