Last Tuesday night, Tratto served an epic meal. Rome-based writer Katie Parla was in town to promote her new book, The Food of the Italian South, and Chris Bianco, Cassie Shortino, and Blaise Faber pulled out all the stops. It wasn’t so much that it was a meal that dazzled you in its intensity of flavor.

It was more about soul and style: tapping into the essence of both the marginal places of a marginalized region (Italy’s south) and our upper Sonoran early spring (frittata with tiny yellow flowers, a dessert of tangelos, and the year’s first local strawberries, minted and iced). It was the kind of meal that zipped you to a faraway place. It was the kind of meal that tinkered with your emotions as much as your taste buds.