Seeking a Triple Threat Italian Restarant in Tacoma

There's a now-deceased restaurant in West Seattle that I measure every Italian restaurant against

Now obviously an individual's preference for this restaurant or that restaurant is exceedingly taste-specific. This individual requires her Triple Threat Italian restaurant to have the following: star house salad, stellar artisan bread with flavorful dipping oil and superb pasta, preferably with a cream sauce of some sort.

Star + Stellar + Superb = Triple Threat.

Ristorante Ragazzi's in West Seattle is the only one I've come across in the last 13 years to fulfill the Triple Threat criteria and it's no coincidence that it set the bar in the first place. When it closed, my heart broke more than a little knowing I'd have a nearly insurmountable task in finding an equivalent.

Favorite restaurants that die live on in our memories and taste buds in a sort of restaurant-neverland that we can't get a reservation for.

Take a drive with me down (memory lane) California Avenue to Ragazzi's in the Admiral District and find street side parking. You'll walk past the Admiral theater, a hole in the wall Pizza by the Slice Place and finally happen upon the door of Rigazzi's. I'll insist this is much better than Angelina's and tell you that you're in for a nirvana experience. You'll enter with me and see a bar on your left and the restaurant going straight back as you walk up to the hostess and ask her to seat the two of us at a booth.

As you sit down with you, you spy the open kitchen across from us on the north side of the restaurant (the smells waft & linger and it's a heady experience that makes your mouth water)and there's an enormous fireplace roaring away. Over the years the decor changed but you'll immediately pick up on its warm and rustic ambiance.

Slices of crusty peasant Italian bread accompanied by a dipping oil of crushed garlic, red pepper flakes and rosemary leaves are brought to the table. You pour a puddle of oil on a small bread plate and tear off pieces of bread to sop it up. You'll order with me the best house salad you've ever had. It'll arrive on a small chilled plate with spring greens dressed generously with a creamy garlic dressing and topped with Parmesan cheese. Like me, you'll want to wipe up the last bit of dressing with your bread off your plate and you do. Without guilt and with much anticipation you order the gnocchi in cream sauce. It arrives in a bowl of generous proportions where individual puffs of the potato pasta float happily in the cream sauce which has a touch of garlic and a sprinkling of nutmeg. The little clouds of heaven melt in your mouth.

You want this meal to be your last meal on earth, you could die happy right now and you make plans to come back as soon as you can. You leave with regret that you don't have room for dessert, but you leave smiling anyway in a haze of having been well fed and fed well.


Back to the present.

Don't get me wrong- I like chicken marsala as much as my mother does and an authentic Florentine Rib Eye is enough to make me want to uproot my life and move to Firenze permanently. But to me, Italian food in America will always be about the pasta and when I crave Italian, I want pasta, not chicken marsala.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of eating at Ristorante Isablla's in Convington. It gets a two out of three! Star salad, Stella bread, but merely decent pasta. Most Italian restaurants only merit 1 out of 3- superb pasta, but so-so bread and eh salad. Or stellar salad, but non existent bread and unispired pasta. Definitely a repeat contender but not quite a Triple threat. The search continues.

The closest gnocchi that nears the heights of Ragazzi's is in Rome- hardly practical or economical for the Tacoma Pregnant Lady. It did have the most amazing Gorgonzola cream sauce of the likes I've only found in Rome.

Vince's in the Renton Highlands and Federal Way has a memorable pesto-cream gnocchi that I go back for again and again. But their house salad is something I avoid and the bread isn't anything worth writing about.

One place I need to check out- at the insistence of co-workers, friends and yelp.com is Salvatore's on Roosevelt Avenue near my work.I feel a glimmer of hope or maybe that's just hunger.

I'm hoping to find my Triple Threat somewhere closer to my home in Tacoma....til then, I'll keep reminiscing of Ragazzi's.