After returning home from the kitchens of New York determined to open his own restaurant, Tampa native Bryce Bonsack traveled to Italy’s Piedmont region to do some soul searching. But Bonsack was on another mission, too. If he wanted his place to focus on pasta, which he mastered while leading pasta production and cooking pasta courses as a sous chef at Brooklyn tasting-menu eatery Blanca, he needed to see where it came from.

“I wanted to see if I could get inside the head of an Italian kitchen and find out what inspires them,” Bonsack said. “Their attention to where their ingredients are coming from and the balance of those ingredients together is what stood out to me the most.” He found what he was looking for in the Roccas, a family who run a high-end restaurant doing traditional Italian fare, polished but not the dots-and-foam stuff he was used to at Michelin-starred joints like Blanca.