Joseph Bollo ran restaurants in Charleston and Folly Beach for two decades, but didn’t develop a spaghetti specialty until the latter half of his career.

When he first opened Washington Square Café, Bollo focused primarily on seafood. Yet at around the same time, spaghetti from his native Italy was starting to catch on with the dining public. Pasta wasn’t new to the U.S., as  Thomas Jefferson had famously served macaroni-and-cheese at an 1802 state dinner, but skinny solid noodles weren’t widely available prior to the immigration wave that brought 4 million Italians to the country between 1880 and 1920.