In researching restaurants that have disappeared from Rhode Island over the past 40-plus years, I have noticed that many of them were in and around the airport. Bertucci’s is the exception. The popular Italian/brick oven pizza restaurant at 1946 Post Road in Warwick replaced Ned Grace’s Monterey back in the late ’70s and has been packing them in ever since.

We used to bring our grandson there from the time he was 5 years old. We went for the food. He went to draw pictures on the wall-to-ceiling blackboard. We revisited Bertucci’s without our grandson Saturday night. He was busy being a doctor in Boston.