Like most others during the COVID-19 pandemic, chef Tom Colicchio passed a lot of his quarantine in the kitchen. "I spent a lot of time home with time on my hands," he tells Yahoo Life. "I noticed that when I was home cooking, a lot of what I was doing was more Italian-oriented than anything else."

So Colicchio, who owns several restaurants in Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles, decided to open his first Italian restaurant, Vallata, where he serves up dishes inspired by his New Jersey Italian-American upbringing. "I'm Italian on both sides of my family ... growing up, the one tradition was every Sunday, we had Sunday gravy," he says, explaining his family's love of the hearty tomato-based sauce filled with Italian meats.