At Fox & the Knife, a 75-seat Italian restaurant in South Boston, you’ll find a bread dish on the menu called tigelle. Also know as crescentina modenese, the disc-shaped appetizer is native to the Italian town of Modena, where chef and owner Karen Akunowicz lived and worked for a year over a decade ago. 

“It’s an old kind of recipe specifically from that region,” Akunowicz recently explained, as she sat in a velvet, tufted banquette at the back of her restaurant just as aperitivo hour commenced. “If I had to compare it to something, I would have to say it’s kind of like an English muffin. Somewhere between a crumpet and an English muffin.”