Welcome to Red Sauce America, our coast-to-coast celebration of old-school Italian-American restaurants.
I fell in love with pasta after reading about an Italian witch. It was 1994, and Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola was hot on the Reading Rainbow circuit. My second-grade teacher invited a guest to read the story, and I listened intently, intrigued by the “grandma witch” with a magic pasta pot that accidentally flooded her town with spaghetti. I don’t remember who our guest was—experiential learning and frequent visitors were normal in our magnet curriculum—but I remember how she passionately taught us to make spaghetti after the reading. We added butter and Parmesan cheese to our fresh noodles, and some risk-takers, like me, topped our bowls off with freshly cracked black peppercorns.
I didn’t have family meals like this, nor a magical cooking grandmother like Strega Nona. Growing up in Malden and Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was a latchkey kid often doing extracurricular activities or in the care of others. My mom, a single mother who emigrated from Haiti to the Boston metro area, worked multiple jobs and rarely cooked. So we dined out often, getting pork chops and blood sausage at Izzy’s Restaurant or griot (fried pork), banan peze (fried plantain), and pikliz (pickled cabbage with Scotch bonnet peppers) at Highland Cuisine when my mom missed home.
Eating the pesto alfredo with massive chicken cutlets and homemade fettuccine became my ritual.
Photo by Joe St. Pierre
But I longed for that second-grade feeling of eating meals as a family. Eventually, I found it at La Famiglia Giorgio’s in Boston’s North End. I was a sophomore in high school, wandering around Little Italy in search of “real Italian” food before a school trip to Italy and for a place to read Weetzie Bat unbothered. I stumbled into La Famiglia Giorgio’s and ordered the pesto alfredo with chicken, broccoli, and homemade fettuccine. Instantly I was hooked. The garlicky cream sauce was like nothing I’d had before, and the chicken was massive, larger than the size of my hand. It was the first restaurant where servers were genuinely kind to me and treated me like a paying customer rather than an inconvenience. The staff let me be, and I sat there for hours, peeling back the pages of my book and trying to tackle the massive dairy-doused cutlets and pile of pasta. It soon became my ritual. Here is where I’d happily spend my after-school job paychecks, where I’d bring friends and secret girl crushes. The dining room of La Famiglia became my own.
